There have been times when people have accused me of being a
cynic and in many ways I do not have much of a defence, although what others
may see as cynicism I prefer to call healthy scepticism. There is probably no
greater field of endeavour in which scepticism or cynicism is likely, nay
inevitable, than at work and (in my experience), nowhere at work more so than in the team building exercise or
leadership courses.
I was reminded of this recently when Val and I went to watch
a recording of the BBC radio comedy, Clare
in the Community, which stars Sally Phillips as Clare, a social worker with
all the right jargon, who likes to sort out other people's problems while
ignoring her own. I am sure that we have all worked with people who know all
the right jargon[1],
all the right buzzwords and who are supremely confident that they are
effective, efficient and productive when in fact they are generally pretty
hopeless. Clare is a control freak who has lost control and what do you get
when a control freak loses control? Yes, a freak.
 |
| Clare in the Community began life as a cartoon in The Guardian. |
In the particular episode that we watched being recorded,
Clare's team leader arranges a team building exercise. This being comedy, this
exercise does not consist of paintballing or raft building (which the team were
hoping for), but takes place in her flat. The location is unimportant, for what
ensues is fairly typical of most team building/bonding exercises or leadership
courses, principally that no one really wants to be there.
Over the years I went on any number of courses while at
work. In the early years these were largely technical in nature, that is to say
they taught you the nuts and bolts of the job. These tended to be quite rigidly
structured; in many ways it was quite like being back at school. But, and this
is an important but, by and large people came back from these courses with more
technical knowledge of how to do their jobs and by extension usually became
more effective or efficient. Gradually however, these courses began to include increasing
elements of training in what may be called leadership or management skills
until eventually there were no technical courses, only courses designed to make
people better at working with other people or in managing them without necessarily being able to do their core
job any better.
Team building exercises tend to fall into two categories;
the fun activity course and the earnest psycho babble course, but both have the
same potential pitfalls. In the fun activity course everyone meets at an
off-site location and a day of quad biking or clay pigeon shooting incorporating
some subtle (or not so subtle) exercises in teamwork, you know the sort of
thing. These may be fun and they may provide people with something to talk
about at the coffee machine for a few weeks after the event, but do they make
people more collaborative at work? Better team players? Better planners? Better
managers? The artificial nature of the activities, the unreal setting and the
fact that ultimately the outcomes on the day are pretty unimportant, means that
it is unusual for anything worthwhile to be transferred back to the workplace.
Anything beneficial that is learned tends to be eroded quite quickly; everyone slips back into their
normal patterns of behaviour sooner or later.
 |
| The outdoor life; team building walking on a rope. |
The psycho babble course will generally take place indoors,
albeit away from the workplace and will normally consist of the less outgoing
members of the team desperately trying to avoid being picked out for some
activity or another and hoping that one of their more gregarious colleagues will
volunteer themselves. Personally I always disliked these types of courses and
especially when the dreaded "role playing" exercise was on the
agenda. Psycho babble courses may be run by other managers in the organisation
and generally these courses are not so bad, at least the people running them
usually have a certain sympathy with the participants. Worse though are the
courses run by outside consultants; earnest young men and women, armed with
motivational techniques and an apparently never ending supply of good humour,
whose goal (unintentional though it may be) appears to be to encourage the
participants to undertake activities with which they are uncomfortable to some
degree or another.
 |
| The normal reaction to a team building seminar. |
The greater incident of certain words and phrases, the
greater the degree of babble included in a course, the greater the likelihood
that the participants will tune out and, in inverse proportion, the greater
likelihood that the course will have limited benefit. "Holistic,"
"empowerment," "leverage," "synergy;" these are
all words that one comes to associate with these courses. Now there is nothing
wrong with any of these words per se
but they tend to be bandied about in courses with little relevance and thereby
fall into disrepute. This can lead to the course organisers becoming annoyed as
the participants appear not to be taking matters seriously, which may just be a
defence mechanism on the part of the group members, particularly when they feel
uncomfortable with whatever activity they are being asked to perform.
Inevitably that old chestnut "There's no I in team," is trotted out,
which means nothing to my mind; I am
presumably part of "the team," so there is in fact an I in team.
In a perverse way these courses do sometimes work (although this
is in spite of the content) by uniting the members of the group in their discontent
and providing plenty of anecdotes once everyone has returned to their normal
jobs.
It is possible that I am being overly critical, perhaps too
sceptical, perhaps even cynical about this type of course or exercise. The last
one in which I took part was actually quite enjoyable, if a little predictable,
but it is doubtful if either I or any of my colleagues performed any better
once we returned to the office as a result of taking part. The sting in the
tail of that particular event was that we were given the task of taking away
the lessons we had supposedly learned and applying them to performing some
community based or charitable task. As a great many of the other teams decided
to support one charity or another, including the immensely popular Help for
Heroes, we decided that to avoid the inevitable compassion fatigue associated
with the frequent demands on our colleagues' finances, we would do something for the
community. We linked up with the Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST)[2]
to help clear a pond on Waterloo Green and later to install some raised flower
beds at a school in Southwark so that the pupils could grow vegetables. Despite
my misgivings about team building or leadership developing exercises, those
tasks that we performed for BOST were immensely rewarding; they drew us all as
participants closer together and enabled us to apply team working and
leadership skills in an unfamiliar environment.
 |
| The pond on Waterloo Green. |
Whether we would have done these things any differently, or
any better, or any worse, had we not been on the course in the first place is
moot.
[1]
Actually there is nothing wrong with jargon when used correctly although it has
been given a bad name over the years. Jargon is special words or expressions
used by a profession or group that are difficult for others, i.e. outsiders to understand. If all parties understand what
is meant then it is perfectly acceptable. Having said that I was once
criticised for using "jargon" when using an expression that was
fundamental to the business and which the listener should have understood; it said
more about him than me, I felt.
[2]
See their website here: http://www.bost.org.uk/
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