Thinking about the Disadvantages of Team Building
Anna gives her perspective on team building at a young age and its discontents. A lesson that not all team building activities are necessarily advantageous.
I recently wrote an article about the advantages and disadvantages of team building exercises for our website.
Of course, since we are a company which organizes team building events I have done a lot of research and created content about how great and important team building is. However, now having researched some critical opinions and downsides, not only of team building but working as a team in general, I feel the need to write down some of my thoughts.
It’s put me in an interesting emotional situation, re-thinking my own experiences with team building and about working as part of a team.
The first time I participated in team building exercises (even though the term “team building” was never mentioned) was back in high school. Since I was the shy, awkward, and unpopular kid in the class, these exercises were dreadful for me. In sixth grade our teacher divided us into groups of four, and handed each group a stack of paper and a raw egg. Our task was to drop the egg off a second floor balcony and to use the paper to prevent it from breaking. Being moody pre-teens, the other members of my group had no ambition when it came to actually completing the task. So I took the lead, and under my instruction we crafted a little basket stuffed with paper shreds and a parachute for the egg. In the end the egg didn’t survive, and since I stuck my head out I was the one who took the blame for the team’s failure. Looking back on it, this exercise did not create or strengthen a single bond at all. I also wish we had at least learned one or more successful solution to the egg challenge. For me nothing was gained–no connections made and no knowledge achieved.
I now believe that it is very important to either communicate the goals of a team building exercise in advance or to discuss it in depth after.
I also think that a bunch of twelve year olds will not be very willing to discuss how they felt and what they learned, especially if they were the “losers” of the competition. Children of that age will probably not understand the true purpose of these exercises on their own — at least I did not back in the day. To me it was a competition of ingenuity and I did not see that the true purpose was to strengthen the connections between group members and thereby increase the interconnectedness of the students.
What further damaged my trust in this class was when we went rock climbing together. Towards the top of the rock my hand got stuck in one of the rubber grips and it took me very long to convince my teacher and classmates that I really was stuck and in pain. Being genuinely scared and not taken seriously does not really increase trust.
Rock climbing is a popular team building activity, and it is said that it will increase the trust in the person who secures the climber. However– and I am aware that this might be naive– the level of trust that I had in my classmates, to prevent me from suffering severe physical harm when it does not pose a risk to themselves, is a level of trust I extend to any random stranger in the street by default.
But did I trust a bunch of my fellow twelve year olds back then to respect my emotional safety and dignity when they could gain an advantage in the social structure of the class by not doing so? No, of course not.
In 9th grade, when my classmates and I were about fifteen– and fifteen year-old teens are a whole different kind of beast– our teacher did a little ad-hoc team building session during a class trip. We were divided into pairs and one person had to close their eyes while being led on a short course through the woods. We were an odd number of students, so I, still being the awkward one, was left. Someone had to take mercy on me and do the round with me. This was actually a positive experience since I felt that this actually did improve my trust in somebody whom I did not have a connection with before and we were able to interact more freely afterwards.
It is interesting that the quick and spontaneous team building exercise had a better effect than the seemingly well-planned out exercises.
This shows that when planning a team building exercise it is crucial to define the goal first so you don’t put a lot of time and effort into an exercise that will have a negative effect in the end. A small exercise with small improvements can be better than a several hours-long exercise that ends up driving people apart and is a big waste of resources and emotional energy for everyone involved.
In the years following, I associated team building only with the cliche of everybody catching a team member who jumps off a table without looking. And of course there are countless jokes in which everybody gets distracted and lets the unpopular person get hurt. I have never been a fan of this particular exercise. Of course it is supposed to be symbolic, but as I said above, I trust that anybody would prevent me from physical harm if it is easy for them to do so– that is no extraordinary level of trust.
Later, in my first job, which was a micro team, the owner of the company actually went out of their way to prevent connections between staff members. I don’t know why, maybe they were afraid that the occasional personal chat would negatively affect productivity. Now, almost fifteen years of working experience later, I am convinced that this had the opposite effect.
In my following jobs I often wished we had good opportunities for team building, since for me personally it is important to know how and by which means I can communicate with an individual teammate in the least disruptive way for them. It would have alleviated a lot of stress and doubts for me. Now working at Invite Japan Nazobako, I really appreciate that we have many opportunities to share personal stories and experiences with each other, which creates a very safe atmosphere and allows open communication.
After I finished working on the blog draft about disadvantages I couldn’t help but give it a positive twist and offer solutions and suggestions to avoid the pitfalls and negative effects of team building. It is so important to pick a team building activity based on the individual needs of the group and to not just pick something from the internet, a book, or a common pop culture trope like the falling exercise, do that once and then vaguely expect significant improvements which were not defined beforehand to magically occur..
It is so important to be clear about what you want to achieve: do you want people to be more comfortable around each other, resolve conflicts between different groups or people, get people to cooperate to solve a problem, or simply experience the satisfaction of cracking the puzzle?
The next point to keep in mind is who you are dealing with, twelve year olds, fifteen year olds, a group of adults from 25 to 65? Mainly extroverts or introverts? These are factors that need to be taken into consideration as well. Maybe you don’t want to pair the shy kid with the rowdy kid. But maybe you want to do exactly this if you think that it’s important for them to learn about how different personalities can complement each other.
Team building activities can be great tools if they are properly planned and held with great emotional sensitivity. An on-the-spot activity can go very wrong if you just pull up a random exercise from the internet without being aware of the goal, meant just for the sake of doing a team building activity.
