Ask any head what drives the success of their school, and a strong and united team of teachers is always near the top of the list. Yet, that’s a pretty difficult aim to achieve. Despite appointing the best available candidates, you may find they work terribly together. Human relationships are always messy and, when people are under the spotlight of accountability and suffering with workload issues, tempers can easily fray.
So every year, thousands of schools plan team-building sessions. Whether it is in the form of trust exercises in the school hall, paintballing on an Inset day or drinks out on a Saturday night, pre-planned team-building exercises are the go-to initiative for many. They work well, their advocates stress; you can see the benefits instantly.
The research supports this view. But the problem is that most of the studies on the effectiveness of team-building exercises stem from the 1950s and 60s; the world of work has changed significantly since then.
Today, many workplace experts and academics are sceptical about organised team-building events. “Personal social ties among team members are extremely important for trust, team cohesion and more. However, most team exercises aren’t very good at building real, meaningful friendships,” says Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland, who directs MIT’s Human Dynamics laboratory. “Those take time and have to be built on a sharing of real, mutual value.”
Address the ‘root cause’
Liz Ryan, chief executive and founder of Human Workplace, a publishing and consulting firm whose mission is to “reinvent work for people”, is not a big fan either. “The problem with team building is that it ignores the root cause of whatever problem you are trying to solve through the use of team-building exercises,” she says. “The root cause of your ‘teamwork problem’ is likely to be a lack of trust between the higher levels of your organisation and the lower levels. It’s cruel and pointless to drag your employees into a room and make them do team-building exercises together with the expectation that you will solve the underlying lack of trust issues - without addressing those issues.”
That’s why she thinks the “happy-smiley” team-building exercise is a fallacy, and why so many employees resent being summoned to this type of event.
“You cannot force people to work as a team,” says Ryan. “If the environment were healthier than it is, you would have no time for team-building exercises and you wouldn’t need them. People naturally work as a team when they trust their managers to stand up for them and treat them like the professionals they are. An effective, productive team is the natural outgrowth of an open, healthy work environment where employees feel safe telling the truth about difficult subjects.
“If trust is missing from your organisation, you will not get the teamwork you seek, no matter how many team-building events you put on.”
Another vocal critic of team-building events is Carlos Valdes-Dapena, founder of Corporate Collaboration Resources, who in October published a book titled Lessons from Mars: how one global company cracked the code on high performance collaboration and teamwork. He believes a revolution in the way we think about team building is needed.
“It goes beyond trust-building exercises and it goes beyond relationships,” says Valdes-Dapena. “It’s really very simple. If you ground the focus of the teamwork in the actual work itself, you’re going to get a more rational approach to where you collaborate and where you choose not to.”
He cites an example: “You would say ‘Look, we’re doing project XYZ together, so let’s talk about who you are as a human being and your preferences and styles, and who I am, and how do we think those ways of being will have an impact on our work together. And then let’s anchor it in this very tangible deliverable that we’re both accountable for.’ In that context, that’s really, really powerful.”
Familiar territory
Although Valdes-Dapena doesn’t rule out the use of team-building exercises as a way of helping members of staff get to know one another, he argues that familiarity does not automatically breed collaboration. “Familiarity breeds familiarity - it’s a sort of social lubricant,” he says. “If we have to work together, we have to get along to a certain extent, but what you won’t see is people collaborating any more, or any more effectively, just because they went out and had a pint together after some bowling.”
Like Valdes-Dapena, Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at the University of Manchester, thinks team-building exercises that are built around people having fun do offer some benefits, but only as long as they meet a strict condition.
“Whatever you do [in terms of team-building exercises] you need to make sure you have a workplace psychologist around to help you with it because, when you team build, the things you do are mostly experiential. But if you don’t focus in on the roles people play when they are doing these exercises and then translate that back into the work environment - ie, the school - then it’s going to be useless,” says Cooper.
The message appears to be that you should by all means plan social gatherings or outings with your staff, but expecting anyone to work better together as a result is misguided. Time to cancel that whole-staff yoga retreat?
Simon Creasey is a freelance writer
