Does teambuilding work?

I had to chuckle when reading Lorna MacLaren's article "Can this really make you a better boss?"(from Scotland's "The Herald" Online).

As she's perched some 14 feet up on a wooden pole during a teambuilding exercise, she wonders how effective it can be for companies to be "shelling out small fortunes to scare the wits out of their managers and staff."

Last week I was facilitating a 3-day project management workshop for a well-known company in Wisconsin. When we got on the subject of teambuilding, multiple stories surfaced about people who got hurt during past teambuilding exercises. I don't recall ever hearing of someone dying during a teambuilding exercise but I can imagine it's happened.

I Googled "team building exercises" this morning, which returned around 143 million results. The options ranged from organized scaventure hunts to mental challenges to demanding physical activities. In Lorna's article she refers to some UK providers offering everything from sumo wrestling simulations to duck herding. Hmm...

Clearly companies around the world are shelling out a lot of clams for this stuff. But does it work?

The key from our perspective: whatever the teambuilding approach, it must help the team work better afterwards.

That may sound obvious but I've seen too many teambuilding exercises/offerings that were fun, but didn't necessarily build the team. Fun is fine and has it's place, but it's not always teambuilding.

The teambuilding workshops and exercises that we facilitate here at the Institute focus on helping participants learn more about themselves, their teammates, and the mission of their teams.

Here's my question for your comments: "What are examples from your career where you saw teambuilding done well? Or not well?"

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Labels: leadership, teambuilding, teams

posted by Andy at 8:18 AM