DIY Team Building - A Recipe for Disaster

Your staff file in to the conference room, full of expectation. The presenter begins. 5 minutes later, still talking, the projector enters shutdown mode. It takes 3 people the next 10 minutes to get it going again. Already the day is lost ... As a manager you will naturally want to include team building in your company or departmental long term strategy. However, it is a false economy and can be demotivating to organise your own as it is so easy to end up with the scenario above with half the day will be spent sorting out errant IT or other irrelevant distractions. Would you want your child to be taught by someone with no expertise? Of course not, so why leave your team building to amateurs then? ... after 40 more minutes of talking about forming, storming, norming and performing, bums are restless on seats. Another 30 minutes and the break is reached much to the relief of everybody ... In other words, the presenter does not have the first idea of how to engage the group, preferring to spend time on explaining how team building works and the benefits. Nice try, but motivational team building needs to be experiential - hands on. Professionals will keep the irrelevant waffle down to a minimum and get into the practical activities with the minimum of fuss, maximising the effectiveness of the day. ... after the break, a 10 minute recap to make sure everyone has learnt the theory. Then a demo of the first team building task. A couple of fumbles and the drinking straws fall of the presenters desk, in a vain effort to catch them, the golf balls are spilled. A further 5 minutes and lots of grovelling round the floor sees all of the props back in place and the presenter continues ... Straws? Adhesive tape? Golf balls? Are we still at school? Is this the annual end of term problem solving? If you outsource your team building, even if you go with a company who is outdated enough to still use materials like this, at least they will be organised enough not to fumble it! ... lunch time. Everyone heaves a sigh of relief and heads off to their desk for their sandwiches. No one succeeded to make a fully functional mobile telephone from straws and sticky tape ... No surprise there then! DIY team building tasks are often too easy or too difficult. If people succeed without facing a challenge, then no real progress will have been made as everyone will have been performing within their existing capabilities. A professional organisation will be well-versed in setting the levels of challenge to ensure that even the most capable in your organisation will be challenged. In addition, they will also have planned in plenty of places where your staff will need to think laterally, communicate and work together in order to achieve success - could someone in your organisation set those aims and objectives and then design activities to achieve them? Finally, during the afternoon session, when boredom is taxing even the most motivated and enthusiastic members of your team, you find several have returned to their desks and are catching up on their work! The solution to this is to organise an away-day for your event. That way, it makes the whole thing a definite event. Most teambuilding organisers will arrange not only the day's events but also a venue, such as a hotel or country club. OK, it's over to you now, you decide whether to irritate people and waste company time and money or spend it wisely ...