Key steps to team building that pay

Knowing that effective team building involves far more than simple quirky haphazard games, Jane then begins the daunting task of sifting through the proposals.

How should she decipher which proposal should win? What standard of measurement should she use?

Foreigners who relocate to Kenya often feel overwhelmed with the high proportion of consultants. Kenya seems to hold consultants in every imaginable field. Even professional association meetings get filled with consultants searching for business. One of the most common type of consultant revolves around team building.

Similarly, Kenyan businesses robustly use team building to improve organisational performance through team cohesion more than arguably any other country on earth.

However, did any of your organisations sit down and assess the results following the team building imitative you last undertook? Is team building useful? More important, does the benefit exceed the monetary and time cost for providing it?

Every firm should assess results, but few do so. Most executives deep down feel satisfaction that at least the staff got together, ran around on a field playing games, shared some meals, and had fun. The executives, in turn, make the assumption that such fun sharing adds value, even if they cannot pinpoint exactly how.

The painful answer regarding team building: good team building initiatives boost firm performance while bad ones make performance worse.

Poorly planned and executed team building programmes constituted by hack consultants may solidify team biases and stereotypes and entrench already dysfunctional teams further.

So, before you engage a team building consultant, initially follow the following four steps.

First, you and your leadership team must decide what you desire to accomplish from the programme. Sure, allowing your employees to engage in fun activities seems important, but that is an output and not an outcome.

To delineate your outcomes, you must first decide what team norms you hope to instil in the team. Team norms encompass informal rules and expectations that a team establishes to regulate member behaviours.

Norms develop through explicit statements, critical events in the team’s history, initial team experiences, and the beliefs and values members bring to the team.

Managers must manage and often shift the norms that develop on teams.

As the manager, you may desire that the team value punctuality and integrate team norms surrounding time arrival for work and meetings.

Another team value that you hope to incorporate as a norm may include integrity. So, a manager’s first critical step before engaging a team building consultant or implementing team building directly must involve deciding all the norms you hope for your team or teams.

Second, go onto Google and perform a simple “team building activities” search. If the consultants sending you in proposals only contain the basic shallow information that anyone may find through Google, then what value can they do for you?

Such consultants are hacks. Do not engage them lest they often cause more harm than good.

Third, look for depth in the midst of proposals. Team building professionals should assist your employees to understand themselves and their own strengths and weaknesses when engaging with their team members.

Professionals then help team members understand and then solidify their own roles on the team and learn how to work with the roles of others on the team.

Fourth, ensure that the consultant intends to create solutions to freeze your group norms, goal setting, problem solving, and types of interpersonal processes that you decided in the first step.

The team building professional must not assume that they know what you desire to achieve from the sessions.

In terms of specifics, team building professionals may use a plethora of techniques to achieve your goals, ranging from role play, pre-event staff questionnaires, statistical analysis on team habits and preferences, skits, movement activities, obstacle courses, intentional debriefing, and the proverbial trust falls.

Monitor results

Then, once you conclude your team building activities, work with the consultant to develop tools to monitor the results of the team building.

Do employees report higher job satisfaction on surveys? Do your employees call in sick less often? Do the group norms you desired to achieve actually occur?

Your team building consultants should also retain in-depth organisational development knowledge that enables them to build explicit and unobtrusive monitoring techniques.
Managers may also find follow-up team building useful.

Most important, managers during staff meetings and one-on-one coaching should refer to the team-building activities and highlight memories from those events when making points.

Coaching sessions

Further, managers must incorporate the group norm goals into their employee coaching sessions to complement the team building sessions and achieve maximum results.
Sounds difficult? Not if planned properly.

USIU offers certification on how to plan and implement effective team building initiatives. You may ask for it when requesting team building consultants so as to know you get knowledge professionals implementing effective techniques.

Let us raise the standard of performance in Kenya and build stronger teams.

In summary, employ good common sense when implementing team building activities.

Team building done correctly boosts company performance exponentially by lowering labour costs and improving top-line revenues.

Prof Bellows is the director of the New Economy Venture Accelerator (NEVA) at USIU’s Chandaria School of Business and Colorado State University
[email protected]; Twitter: @ScottProfessor.