It’s a really great question that we should answer before we go and do team building activities at work. ‘m Chad Littlefield and I exist on the planet to make connection and engagement easy for some of the most innovative, creative, companies on the planet as well as some of the top universities. I’m excited to dive in today to share a handful of things. But one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about team building at work.
BLOG NOTE: The following is an adapted and edited transcript of one of our daily YouTube tutorials. We know sometimes it is easier to scroll through written content which is why we are publishing here. Because of that, there may be typos or phrases that seem out of context. You’ll definitely be able to get the main idea. To get the full context, visit our YouTube channel here. And if you want to watch the video on this topic specifically, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post to access it as well.
I’m going to be sharing one huge myth in the way that people think about team building that will totally shift paradigm and hopefully make team building a lot more palatable rather than thinking about it as trust falls in the woods and really cheesy corny activities that you have to do that feel forced. Hopefully offer you a very new perspective on that. And then I’ll be sharing 3 pretty mind-blowing research studies that point to why it’s valuable to invest time into team building exercise activities. I’m also going to share 4 really simple 2-word or less questions that the second you’re done watching this video, you can use to start building your team in a non-cheesy campy sort of way.
First of all, the biggest mistake that people make when they’re thinking about team building is they think about it… Let’s use the metaphor for a moment of if you wanted to lose weight. If you wanted to cut off 25 pounds, I would not recommend going to the gym on Monday for 12 hours. You will hurt yourself, right? And it probably won’t work. Now, going on a walk every day and swapping out the barbecue hamburger for the salad every once in a while, over time right over the course of several months may work really well for you. Yet, with team building, we think, “Alright, what are we going to do this quarter for our off-site” Let’s take uh the entire day… Or even better, let’s rent a place a venue spend $100,000 and stay overnight. Let’s do 2 to 3 days get away and team build. And I think that’s trying to force losing 25 pounds. I think the healthier way to think about team development is weaving a culture of connection throughout your organization.
Because what team building really is is gaining a better understanding of each other to create communication shortcuts. It’s understanding how to communicate with some people and how not to. How to problem solve, how to collaborate more effectively. And also being able to simply connect and enjoy the people that you’re working with.3 studies that I want to unpack and share that are a bit mind-blowing.
One is one of the most phenomenal pieces of research that I’ve found done in collaboration with Harvard and Google. Google’s this small little company with a 100,000 plus employees. Google is a company that really likes data. They like your data, they like my data and they really like their employees data. They set out to figure out on a quest to figure out what are the characteristics of the highest performing teams at google. The number one characteristic of high performing teams wasn’t the years of technical experience, it wasn’t the perfect personality Myers-Briggs, Strengths finder enneagram match. The number one characteristic of high-performing teams at google was the degree of psychological safety in that team. Which is really academic PHD term language for “Can I be myself at work? Can I show up and trust that my ideals will be constructed and built up? Rather than gossiped behind my back.” Right?
The number one characteristic of high performing teams at google is the degree of psychological safety in that team. And so, I would say anything you do to weave in a culture of connection in small doses. And you can do and offsite you can take a day to go focus on team, that’s fine. And I would still weave it in. You can’t just go to the gym once a quarter if you want to get healthy. You’ve got to go at least a few times a week.
Connection before Content
One of the tools that I really like to share with people is this idea of connection before content. Inviting people in a meeting to spend a few minutes connecting to each other and the purpose of why you’re there does wonders at increasing that psychological safety in incremental bits. You don’t need to do it all at once. That’s study number one.
Study number 2 was one of my favorite articles that was published in New York magazine. It was titled something to the effect, maybe we could flash up on the screen. I forget the exact language but Icebreakers Are Terrible. and They Also, Unfortunately Work Really Well. And I love that idea because they’re… You know, nobody… I shouldn’t say nobody. Very few people love jumping on a treadmill and running 5miles. But it’s good for you, right? In the same way doing this connection before content or icebreakers, doing team building stuff, even if there’s a little bit of an eye roll, may actually work.
And in fact, my co-founder and I, Will Wise created this book called Ask Powerful Questions Create Conversations That Matter. And one of the things we did in the second edition by request was go through and infuse a ton of the science behind asking really great questions and creating conversations that matter which I would say maybe is even a better way of framing team development or team building is creating conversations that really matter that go beyond the like chit chat, how-was-your-weekend-bob sort of small talk conversations. Throughout the book, we’ve done these little conversation bubbles with a bunch of really fascinating data studies, etc. The other study that I’ll share with you here is one published in the Harvard Business Review is that:
companies with highly effective communication practices on average enjoyed 47% higher returns.
Which isn’t like a big surprise. Okay, you communicate better. You work more productively, your meetings are more engaged, people leave less, right? However, decades and decades of educational psychology research has pointed to the fact that when you know personal information about someone, it creates those communication shortcuts which in this case create higher returns for your company. Even though we don’t feel like answering the question or having people answer the question, you know, “What is one of your favorite topics of conversation?”
Is work related or necessarily is going to make us more productive. But kicking off your meeting with a question like that and exchanging some of that personal information will create communication shortcuts that will make your team more loyal less likely to leave, more engaged in the process, more connected and create those communication shortcuts that allow you as a team to collaborate more effectively. What I want to dive into now that data shared out. I want to just unpack 4 questions that you can use and adapt to build your team throughout.
Like in the middle of a meeting, at the end of a meeting at the end of a retreat, at the beginning of a retreat to weave these questions in. I used to teach a team and leadership development class at Penn State university. One of the things that we would teach in that class was the experiential learning cycle which is really… You know, we have hundreds of experience or moments each day. Most of them we just forget and kind of just pass by like water flowing down a river. The idea with the experiential learning cycle is you pause long enough to reflect and actually learn something from that. And when you do it as a group. It has an amazing ability to move you forward and actually develop your groups or build your team. And the model goes in sort of a pattern of you have an experience, you reflect, you find meaning and then you apply.
The 4 questions that are connected to that that you can pretty easily memorable that you can weave in and think about is are What, Gut So What, Now What. What is literally rewinding the tape. What happened? Sometimes just debriefing something allows the team to kind of reflect, remember, connect over that shared experience.
Gut is taking a minute to say “How’d it feel?” Did it make you nervous? Was it boring? Was it exciting? How did it make you feel? So What is meaning making, right? Experience if we don’t attach it to some meaning and some learning is…. Then the final question “Now What?” What do we do with this? If you think about this framework, you’ve just mastered.. It was a master’s degree in the experiential learning cycle.
What, Gut, So What, Now What. If you think about weaving those questions and you don’t necessarily need to literally ask those questions exactly as they are. But they represent the pieces that take you from experience to actually constructing, building, adapting, growing as a team and then also turning it into action.
I invite you to continue asking powerful questions that create conversations that matter. Let go of the thought and need that you have to team build all at once in one day. Weave it throughout it. Cut out 5 minutes at the beginning of each meeting. Your team will feel a lot healthier and a lot less burnt out from trust falls in the forest.