Teams are powerful tools for effectiveness in organizations. But I think most team building activities pursued by companies are a waste of time and rarely accomplish their intended goals. While teams are essential for a company's success, getting them to perform is actually pretty hard.
I was recently invited to speak at an event hosted by East West Initiatives, a Jordanian youth organization. They asked me to talk about the importance of team building at Tanasuk. I was the real world example following a day of Team Building exercises led by Ahmad Al-Assad. Ahmad is a popular speaker in Amman and his activities were outstanding: http://www.waqtak.com. The activities were engaging and the 40 college students at the training worked really well together. Their final activity was a falafel sandwich making competition (I got a free lunch out of the deal).
But do teams like this exist inside companies? Not often. Most organizations have structures and culture that discourage effective teams. Often, the same management that thought a team building seminar would be a great idea are usually the ones that derail their effectiveness. There are three important reasons for this:
- Leaders fail to delegate decision making to the team, it steals their power.
- Leaders and team members are afraid that the success of individuals within the team will threaten their own success.
- Leaders often fail to communicate vision, clarify objectives, and keep team accountable to those.
Teams will never succeed in organizations and hierarchies that reward individual success. At Tanasuk, we try to combat this with our "Make Your Friends Look Good" value statement. Performance evaluations and bonuses take this value into consideration. If a team member is trying to take credit for the success of the team, we get pretty upset. We get really excited however, when an employee comes to us and shares about the outstanding job that another team member is doing.
Teams are powerful because they can make better decisions than individuals. This can be threatening for management. For a team and an organization to perform well, decisions must be delegated to teams. It is the role of the executives to tie the success of the manager to the success of his team.
Team building starts at the top of the organization and without the willingness to give up individual success for the success of the team, team building will be a waste of time.