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Team Building: The Myth That People Like Working Together
By harveyrobbins | August 28, 2007
Say you have just been to a galvanizing seminar on high performing teams, or read one of the excellent happy team books that abound on business bookshelves. You are excited about the potential teams have. You decide to “GO TEAM” with your colleagues.
You think, if we are to be a team, we must live, eat, breathe, and perform daily ablutions as a team. You tear down the cubicle walls, throw everyone in a pit together, sit back, and wait for those inevitable high-performance team results.
And wait. And wait.
You can wait till the cows come home, but high performance does not. The reason is that - surprise - people do not like being thrown into pits en masse.
Let’s start out by stating that most people do have a real need, deep down, to work together. This is true in the aggregate. But we don’t generally like being shackled to one another at the ankle. That’s not a team, it’s a chain gang.
People - average Americans, anyway - need their space to feel calm and safe. Spending the whole day in a playpen with teammates sounds less like a prescription for high performance teamwork than a French drama of existential ennui.
Some of the most successful team environments I have visited don’t feel all that “teamy” at first glance. In one highly successful team oriented engineering company, the offices of team members are small, dimly lit, quite, and include two desks facing away from one another. The engineers using the room are in constant contact, sharing information - but not smelling one another’s breath. The overwhelming impression is of seclusion, not Monkey Island.
In designing a team environment, do not expect people to crave constant contact with one another. Honor their reluctance to lose their individual identity to the team.
It’s a fine line you have to walk. High performing teams require that people must be able to access one another instantaneously. There must be no communication snags anywhere. But people need their privacy, too.
Be aware that environment matters. Find out what works. Chances are it will be about midway between the penthouse and the outhouse.
Topics: Team Building At Work |