Team Building part 1 - Another Brick in
Wall?The first in a series of articles giving a slightly different viewpoint on effective team building, condensed from an original seminar presented by author, John Roberts. John is a Freelance Training Consultant and director of JayrConsulting Ltd. Part 1 deals with selecting and building initial team. The ideas expressed are personal opinions built up from many years of experience in Electronics/Aerospace industry, Armed Forces, Telecoms industry and Training industry. There is no suggestion of this being a 100% solution applicable to or workable in all situations, but it is aimed at getting people to think outside of norm and question ‘normal' way of doing things.
1. Analogy - The bricks in wall
Most people have been on some form of ‘team building' course. They vary according to contemporary fashion from things like ‘learning how to work together, to build bridges out of sheets of paper', to more active residential courses, where people build rafts out of rope and washing up liquid bottles, to ‘cross a crocodile filled' ravine! They all have two things in common: - (a)They tend to be very expensive in terms of cost per delegate to participants. (b)They are actually not very effective in building effective teams when people return to their real life situation. Teams are about individual PEOPLE and INDIVIDUAL skills that they bring to team and how these should be selected and put together to form an effective and lasting entity. All that is needed can be covered in a 1-day seminar/discussion with a group of delegates with no more props than a white board and marker pen. If it is delivered in such a way that delegates can be coerced to look at themselves and their teams HONESTLY, it can provide effective change in team culture, creating belief and ‘buy in' from delegates and without imposing high expenses on clients.
The analogy that I use to explain basic ideas is that of building a wall, and I use two types of wall to explain contemporary team building model and alternative one. The contemporary model is likened to a ‘standard' brick wall and alternative model is likened to a ‘dry stone' wall, of type found in northern fields!
2. The contemporary model and it's shortcomings!
Visualise a contemporary brick wall: Bricks all same size, weight and shape. In order to stand up bricks have to be ‘glued' together with mortar. Bricks must be aligned exactly in rows vertically and horizontally or wall will fall down. The mortar has to be replaced periodically, or wall falls down. If a brick is not exactly same size as all others it has to be padded out with extra mortar, or - wall falls down! The bricklayer has to keep tending wall - replacing mortar etc. - or wall falls down! Life of wall is fairly limited due to wearing out of materials, so eventually - wall falls down! Bricklayer is competent enough, as long as bricks match and he has an ongoing supply of mortar and time to effect repairs.
Key: - Bricks = Individuals and their skills Mortar = support from Team Leader and Human resources ( competencies, assessments etc ) Bricklayer = Team leader
Problems often start at recruitment stage. The recruiter ( Team leader or manager ) tends to put together an all-encompassing job description, instead of isolating specific individual EXPERT skills that are required for project and are very unlikely to all be expert skills for one person. You only have to look at average recruitment advert to see types of skill lists that people ask for from one delegate! Human resources then compile a list of required competencies based on this information that ALL delegates have to fit into - and we are well on way to selecting our almost identical bricks.
What tends to happen now is that you have a team of good ‘all rounders' but few people with exciting expert skills in any one thing. So what you get is a team that is competent but not outstanding and this has become normal model that people tend to have become used to. This type of team conforms to all of standard corporate ‘norms' and is much easier to deal with for a ‘team leader' that is also possibly not a truly expert and exciting ‘leader'.
Remember - ‘if you do what you have always done - you get what you have always got!' Over years I have experienced too many of these types of teams ( and team leaders ) and I know it can be done much better!
The problem is then compounded by fashion for ‘competencies' and ‘Annual assessments'. Managers and team leaders are told to assess their team members annually and to concentrate on improving their ‘weaknesses'! WHY?
Firstly - any team leader that waits a year to point out a problem to one of their team should not be doing job! Communication and feedback between leader and all team members should be continuous and open at all times.
Next - why concentrate on improving their weaknesses - all you are going to do is end up with a collection of ‘cloned' bricks again! What you should be doing is emphasising team members' positives and constantly improving their strengths - very skills you hired them for in first place. If you have someone who is a brilliant programmer, then you want to help them be an even better programmer for sake of project and team - someone else in team probably has good report writing skills or whatever. Different people are good at different things - use it, don't suppress it!
