Teams Blog

People in my line of work don’t want to admit there is little objective evidence team building works. Reports that it does come from people like me, and the people who pay people like me, all of whom have a vested interest in it working. Few team builders bother to create metrics proving a measurable change occurred, as I like to, and fewer customers are willing to pay for tracking those metrics. It has bothered me that I could not point to a study done by scientists with nothing to gain showing for sure that team development impacts team performance. Then I cam across a promising study title from last year: “Does Team Building Work?”

An army of scientists from the Univ. of Central Florida and the U.S. Army Research Institute said in their article in Small Group Research that recent study results were mixed at best, with many studies showing no impact. So they searched for every study of team building interventions that measured performance from a 47-year period. Using data from the 103 studies they found, the researchers state that teams which had performed team-building activities also had better processes, and their members felt better about their teams.  Performance was stronger, too, but the correlation was not as high. You can have better satisfaction and processes without having better measurable performance, obviously. Team building had a weak impact on the team’s thinking processes (cognition). The overall impact of team building was much stronger for teams with ten or more members, probably because they had more problems and thus more room for improvement. For the specific numbers and source information, see my study summary.

Team building aimed at setting team goals and clarifying roles was better than activities that tried to improve interpersonal relations or problem-solving. This is consistent with my observations, though I am biased. My services focus on the first two; teach problem-solving only in context of solving the team’s task issues; and only target interpersonal problems directly as a last resort. Fixing group dynamics eliminates most person-to-person issues while providing more bang for the team’s bucks.

All of that is good news for anyone tying to convince someone to do team building. But don’t get too excited. There are many limitations to this encouraging study. As best I can tell after rereading the same paragraphs five times, it does not differentiate between the games- and ropes-courses method of team building and approaches like mine that help team members agree on formal structures and processes. This disappointed me, since it won’t help prospects choose between these approaches.

The study does not prove that the team building activities caused the positive outcomes. In theory, it could be that teams with high performance are more likely to do team building, perhaps because their efficiency gives them more time for it. Or other factors might encourage both better team performance and more team building, and thus be the root causes. Based on my experience, I think that is part of the story, but those factors are not enough to create high-performance teamwork.

Then there’s the problem of the “intervention effect,” the teamwork equivalent of the placebo effect in medicine. Drug studies can’t just compare people who took a drug with those who didn’t. They have to compare those who took the drug with, for example, people who took a pill that looked like the drug but was made of plain sugar (a “placebo”). Usually the people given placebos do better than those who took nothing. If the drug takers did no better than the placebo takers, it’s back to the lab for the drug maker. By the same token, there is some evidence that doing anything for a team makes the team perform better for a while, perhaps because the employees are happy just to be noticed. Have everybody stand on their heads for a minute and they might report higher morale (until they get back to work).

Nonetheless, all of you with managers or employees (or clients) who refuse to do team building now have some solid ammunition from nearly 50 years of research. In my experience, resistors have experienced something like a team rafting trip that brought no lasting results back at work. Or they were forced to take personality tests that were helpful but only addressed a tiny part of the overall problems, problems that remained unaddressed. Team building works, the UCF research team says. You simply have to choose the kinds that directly target the problems you are facing.

Action Item: If you have been thinking about doing some team building, contact TeamTrainers for a diagnosis of the issues prompting the thoughts. If we can’t help you directly, we’ll know someone who can.

Usually for fun—in the sense that it’s usually fun and usually not for pay—I do an occasional backstage gig, returning to my undergraduate roots. Recently I completed a production with a dance school. This round got me to reflecting on how the lack of role definition can cause friction on a work team, and how easily that friction can be minimized through simple communication.

My job was easy compared to the rest of the “running crew” (techies who work during the show, not just setting it up and “striking” afterwards). All I had to do was run projections displayed on a curtain at the back of the stage using PowerPoint on a laptop, plus raise and lower the houselights and make onstage fog. All of it boiled down to pushing buttons. However, as the only official crew member onstage, the others being in a booth at the back of the audience, I also served as the eyes and ears of the stage manager. The SM “calls the show,” which is to say she was telling the lighting guy and I when to do our next things. Next to me onstage, but not on headsets to the booth, were the technical director and director of the company.

Both are wonderful people  whom I enjoy working with. Like most directors and choreographers, the boss gets perfectionistic during a run. Most backstage personnel do, too, if they’re any good. But usually the boss is not backstage during the production, turning things over to the SM. It was sometimes unpleasant to be stuck between the bosses onstage and the person literally running the show in the booth. The former could not hear what the status was of the sound and lights. Furthermore, to save money, we had never run a “dry tech” in which the nonperformers talk through the “cues” (technical changes such as a shift in lighting or sound). So the stage manager didn’t know she was supposed to call the next projection cue with the next light cue, instead of calling it later with the music cue as she was doing. Meanwhile, the bosses kept pushing me to go with the next cue without recognizing the pattern. At more than one point I literally had three people talking to me at once and saying different things.

This is not intended as a complaint, but rather an allegory. How often have you found in the working world that you were getting different messages from well-meaning stakeholders who clearly weren’t talking to each other? How often has the fix been a simple matter of getting them together briefly? In this case, after the dress rehearsal, the stage manager rightly insisted that we run a dry tech right then. It took maybe 30 minutes, and as a result the performances went fine minus the usual minor glitches. Certainly the bosses and audiences expressed their approval.

Another friction point was cleared up when the stage manager gladly ceded the cue calls on the curtain to the director. Again I had been stuck between the SM telling us to “go” and the curtain puller refusing to do so. The director had told the puller she would make the call, but hadn’t told me or the SM about this change from the norm. After a rough rehearsal, I told the SM, and she had no issue with the change once told about it.

A few minutes to clarify who was to do each task, and to talk through how the work of the show was to be accomplished, would have saved far more time as well as heartache on the parts of five people. Anything like that going on in your team?

P.S. If you are in the Raleigh, N.C., USA, area, come visit with me next Tuesday (5/18/2010). I’ll be serving on a panel discussing “Sales, Service & Support: Working as a Team,” at a luncheon sponsored by Linking Raleigh NC. To join us, see http://bit.ly/dbNX2S. I’d love to meet you!