Team Building Delivers Results from the First Meeting

Team building is sometimes thought of as a “nice to have”, to do if there is time, perhaps a special treat for a job well done. Less appreciated, is the critical role team building plays in achieving team results. An important team building strategy is to start attending to team building the instant a team first meets.

Recently I had the opportunity to see four self-managing teams within the same organization present their year’s worth of effort and what was immediately apparent to me was that two of the teams had achieved more than they ever thought possible and the other two teams had barely met the minimum requirements of what was expected of them.

I got to thinking, “why was that?” What made the difference between these teams and contributed to the results they had achieved?

One thing evident to me was that members of the two teams achieving strong results obviously liked each other and there was a strong sense of team identity amongst them. In the other two teams, members acted almost like a random collection of individuals. What was especially striking was that the “low results” team consistently said “I” as in “I did”, “I thought” I wanted” whereas the “high results” team members almost exclusively said “we”, as in “we did”, “we thought”, “we wanted”.

Which came first, I wondered, team success or team identity and team members’ positive relationships? In other words were team members proud of their success and therefore liked being members of the team or did their strong sense of team identity aid their success?

Richard Hackman, author of Groups That Work and Those That Don’t describes “self fueling spirals” as having a significant effect on the success of a team. Teams that experience early positive experiences tend to improve over time, whereas those which experience hurdles and setbacks tend to continue to deteriorate. These effects may be internal to how the team is designed and how team members interact and work together or can be due to outside conditions or events that help or hinder team progress. One possible reason for self fueling spirals is that our labels and beliefs about ourselves and others can have a powerful effect on our results. An early set back may cause team members to self label in a negative light and then have a hard time changing that diagnosis.

Thus it seems important to design and enable positive results early on for teams to enhance likelihood of success. In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, Richard Hackman states that team member’s experiences and perceptions early in the life of a team (as early as the first 2 minutes!) can impact the team for the rest of its existence. Indeed, the four teams that I described at the beginning of this post reported that their first meetings were quite different from each other. The two teams that had met with success had spent their first meetings getting to know each other and defining how they wanted to work together. One of these teams spontaneously developed a ritual “check in” to start each of their meetings, wherein each team member would say a few words about what was happening in their lives prior to getting to the work of the meeting. The “low results” teams were less clear about how their first meetings were initiated and there was a sense of scattered focus and lack of cohesion which seemed to prevail throughout the team’s existence.

References and Links:

Why Teams Don’t Work, Harvard Business Review, May 2009

Groups That Work (and Those That Don’t): Creating Conditions for Effective Teamwork (Jossey Bass Business and Management Series)