Turns out it’s more complex than it sounds. Let’s take a Deep Dive.
🏆 Everyone knows a cohesive, motivated group of people working together as a team are more productive and efficient that a group of alienated individuals working separately from each other. The challenge is how to make that happen.
⚖️ It’s important to understand what you’re trying to achieve. Team building can mean several different things and have a range of objectives, from clarifying team goals and individual roles to solving specific problems to improving interpersonal relations.
〽️ Team building can be a process, a culture, an attempt to change a culture, as well of course as a series of events undertaken on a corporate away day. In all of those cases, it can be difficult to measure whether it’s successful or not, because it’s hard to isolate and quantify the effects of particular attempts at team building.
🌏 These days companies are more likely to be globalised and involve people from different cultural backgrounds; and to be virtual, decentralised and less physically present; plus boundaries between organisations and their constituent parts are not as clear cut as they used to be. All of this can make team building more of a challenge.
QUOTABLE
“None of us is as smart as all of us.”
—US author and management guru Ken Blanchard
BY THE NUMBERS
31%
31 percent of US workers dislike team building activities, according to a survey by business software company Citrix and market research group Wakefield Research.
2.5
Companies with engaged employees make 2.5 times the revenue of those whose staff have low engagement levels.
97%
According to McKinsey, 97 percent of employees think a poorly aligned team will have a negative impact on the outcome of a project.
US$46 billion
US companies spend US$46 billion annually on team building activities, according to trade group the Association for Talent Development.
75%
75 percent of people who choose to leave their jobs do so because of their bosses, according to employee retention specialist Roger Herman.
QUIZ
What percentage of the variation in a team’s performance can be attributed solely to the number of personal interactions between team members?
A. 5%
B. 20%
C. 35%
Scroll to the bottom of the email for the answer.
DID YOU KNOW?
The concept of team building—in fact the concept of teams within organisations generally—only goes back about 100 years, when researcher Elton Mayo found in an experiment that changes to the working environment in a US factory, coupled with the fact that management were seen to be taking an active interest in the workers, resulted in increased productivity.
Tom Wujec conducts a research exercise, dubbed the “marshmallow problem”, that tests team building in a variety of different age groups and professions—but why does a surprising group always beat the average?
THE FULL PICTURE
This Stuff Takes A While
How long a team building programme will take to effect genuine change very much depends on what you’re trying to achieve: you can make people aware of particular messages in a matter of hours, according to training company Silega Global, but changing the organisational culture will take at least six months.
Source: Silega Global
MOVERS & SHAKERS
Team Building Truth Tellers
The Doomsayer Patrick Lencioni Author and management consultant Patrick Lencioni is best known as the author of wildly popular business fable The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002), which as the name suggests mainly details what can go wrong, and has written nine other business books, focusing mainly on leadership, teamwork and organisational efficiency. He is also one of the founders of consultancy The Table Group.
The Motivational Speaker Simon Sinek Author, motivational speaker and former adman Simon Sinek has written several books on leadership and teamwork, the best known among them being Start With Why (2009), in which he argues that inspiration is the most effective way to lead teams, and that leaders need to start by understanding their teams’ motivations.
An Innovative Disruptor Whitney Johnson The CEO of WLJ Advisors, Whitney Johnson is the author of Build an A-Team (2018) and Disrupt Yourself (2015), in which she describes how teams, people and organisations can orient themselves for more productive growth. She is also the co-founder with so-called father of disruptive innovation Clayton Christensen of the Disruptive Innovation Fund.
Gen.T Spotlight
An Honouree To Follow
Amarit Charoenphan Amarit Charoenphan is building communities through his Hubba network of co-working spaces, which have more than 100,000 members. The company is a Google for Entrepreneur Partner network hub in Thailand, further connecting those members with other co-working spaces and communities in 135 countries. He is also the organiser of the Techsauce Global Summit conference.
Did you miss our Deep Dive on How Yoga Took Over The World? Read it here.
ONE FINAL THING
When Team Building Goes Bad
Attempts at building team cohesion, even well intentioned ones, can sometimes go badly wrong, for reasons ranging from cultural difference to irrelevance to raging insensitivity.
NEXT WEEK
How We Beat Pandemics
That's it for this issue. Have a productive week!
The Deep Dive is a weekly close-up look at an idea, issue or trend that’s shaping Asia’s future. This issue was written by Richard Lord, with production by Samantha Topp and Denise Ng. It was edited by Lee Williamson.
We’d love to know what you think of this issue, and future topics you’d like us to cover. Please send your comments to editor@generationt.asia. And if you missed it, don’t forget to check out last week’s Deep Dive, on How Yoga Took Over The World.
