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Team Building Activity: Creating a Teaming Environment
By harveyrobbins | October 23, 2007
Organizations seeking the collaborative spirit of teams without the structural upheavals should consider attacking their existing non-collaborative culture hammer and tongs.
The way to create a collaborative atmosphere or “teaming environment” is neither mysterious nor expensive. You begin by sending a simple but unmistakable signal through the organization: you stop rewarding destructive, competitive, one-up behaviors, and you start rewarding group minded behaviors.
Then you examine, as honestly as possible, exactly how your organization actually works. Examine behavior, not executive memos. Do people hoard information, keep it from one another? Do they allow one another to fail, without stepping in to provide assistance or encouragement? Is it an organization in which not just functions are enclosed silos, shut off from others by expertise, but one in which every person is an enclosed silo, shut off from others by fear?
If so, you could benefit from a dose of collaboration. Or failing that, napalm.
Take a little thing like e-mail. In a highly competitive environment, e-mail tends to be infrequent, disclosure of negatives tends to be rare, crucial information is typically withheld, and interested parties are conspicuously excluded.
In an environment striving to become more collaborative, e-mail is a common way for people to share news of their progress, or lack of progress. If someone is having a problem or is unable to get over the hump on a project, he or she calls attention to it, and others rally to his or her side with suggestions. E-mail provides a wonderful little collaborative tool – and the CC list, a quick way to include others in the message. Everyone who is affected by your work should be CC’d with relevant messages.
Obviously, you can go overboard with the CC command. You can bring an organization to its knees by including everyone in it in every message. But you get the idea.
Another way to collaborate is through joint staff meetings. Get people outside your function, but whose work yours affects, involved in your planning and reporting.
A third way is to create leadership “bridge teams”. If your organization doesn’t have formal teams, the leaders of work groups can still get together to touch base and alert one another to upcoming problems, and put an end to inevitable turf wars before they flare out of control.
A fourth way is to fiddle with reporting relationships. Just because you work in a silo does not mean you always have to report within that silo. IT and finance types benefit immeasurably by having direct-line relationships outside IT and finance, with the production or sales or engineering departments, for example. It’s like a fresh breath of air – in fact, a blast of real life.
Topics: Team Building Activity | 1 Comment »
April 1st, 2010 at 11:04 pm
[...] School of Public Affairs held a team building exercise for its incoming graduate student class.Team Building Activity: Creating a Teaming Environment | High …Team Building Activity: Creating a Teaming Environment. By harveyrobbins | October 23, 2007. [...]