If you have ever dreaded team building or you’re leading a group in team building who is dreading it, this video is for you. If you’re a hundred percent pumped for all things team building, you’re going to really love the massive story of personal failure that I’m going to share in this episode, along with the learnings that came from it. In those learnings lies a really important lesson on how to make team building activities successful.
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I used to teach team building and facilitation at Penn State University. Now, I get hired by some of the coolest organizations and other universities on the planet to help make connection and engagement really easy in their own contexts. I train people to do this and in this video, I’m gonna share my most cringing moment of team building that I’ve ever experienced and what I learned from it.
Let me paint you the picture. I was in Spain working with a company that I was so psyched to work with. I was hired by this company- in my mind it was one of, I don’t know, I was probably 3 years into starting “We and Me.” I’ve been doing the business for 7 years. About 3 years into it and I was like, “Oh, that’s gonna be a long-term client. They’re amazing, they’re just mission vision culture overlap. This really cool company who shall remain nameless throughout this video and I got there, I flew into Spain, I’m there so psyched. I did so much design and preparation beforehand. Thought about it so much. 115 people, all staff company retreat at this lovely little villas retreat center thing. It was all magical. It was all just like, “Ah! This is just- this is how could this not be successful? How could this retreat- how could the team building stuff that I’m going to be leading, how could this not completely go off without a hitch? Screeching halt about halfway through the day, we break for lunch and I’ve led several activities. People smiling, laughing like it looks like everything is going really well. We led an exercise with involved- if you remember memory as a kid where you like turn over options or turn over cards and try to remember what card they are. We did that with their values, with like a dozen tables set up around this giant room, just like everybody collaborate. It was blast like you could see videos of it. It looks like it was a blast and yet at lunch I’m like hearing rumbling and I’m picking up that like something is there.
There’s just people are not digging it at all and I am just- I like in that moment filled with like nerves, butterflies, maybe a bit of shame, sadness. I’m like I’m feeling like a failure before it’s even fully happened. I’m like, “I did so much prep for this like I really worked extra, extra, extra hard to try to impress and make an amazing experience for this client and I’m falling short.” What I realized was or what I missed was that even though I was in Spain, and I speak enough Spanish to get by and so I was that like excited about that cultural connection as well. I’ve traveled all around and so I consider myself to, you know, be in tune with multiple cultures. The feedback was that this is way too American. And team building is kind of an American-ish word in some ways.
What I learned and realized was even though I was in Spain, there were 40 different passports in that group of 115 people. There are people from all different cultures, right. And I was leading exercises that catered to 1. That catered to 1 culture and this is like, to be honest it’s a little painful to even recount. I didn’t know how deep I was going to go in this story here as we’re sharing. I feel a little bit of what Brene Brown called a “vulnerability hangover.” That’s happening right now. But there was this element that no matter how much I tried to make it great, what I lacked were 2 things and here are the learnings that I would love for you to take from me to make your own team building really successful.
The 2 major learnings I have was you’ve got to ask the right questions and you’ve got to do it from a place of empathy. I asked a lot of questions. Will and I wrote an entire book about asking questions. I asked a lot of questions beforehand because part of my intention was to really get to know this client well because I figured we’re gonna be working for years. Years and yet what I found was um that I asked a lot of questions that were rooted in my curios- my selfish curiosity about their culture. “Ooh, tell me about this and like, dude tell me about this. Tell me about this.” It was ’cause I thought they’re such a cool company. It’s a company that you might have heard of before. Such a cool company right and I’m asking all these questions to learn and know about them. I didn’t ask enough questions from their perspective to really understand, you know, what are their deepest challenges? What are their struggles? What is their culture really like?
Trying to dig up culture from a zoom call, takes some really intentional, thoughtful questions. I just missed the mark. I showed up, I knew a lot about this cool company, not a lot about the people that work for that company. That’s where the empathy element really comes in here. If I had asked those questions from the perspective of “I am an employee. I was just hired by this tech company 5 months ago and now I’m going to this all staff retreat. I don’t even know everybody’s name.” or “I’ve worked here for 6 years since the company was founded, and I know everything about this company now the company’s really big and I feel like people are kind of invading my space.” If I ask questions from that place of empathy, my retreat would have been sweet. That retreat would have been amazing. Because I would have designed for the people, not designed for the show. This is lesson number, I think I’ve already shared lesson number 1. I’ve lost track.
Design For People Not Performance
Lesson number 52 on how to make team building activities successful is designed for people not performance. What I mean for that is don’t design for- I think a lot of team building is like this performative element of like there’s 2 ways you can do something for show or you can do it authentically, right. You can get your whole group together to go build bikes for kids who need bikes, and that could be a team building exercise or activity or day, right. You could do that just for a show and people are like, “Oh man, we’re here. Whatever.” Or you could do that and be like, “Ooh, can we can we attach letters to the bikes so we can send them to the-“. There’s 2 very different ways to do it. I was doing team building for performance to try to show and prove myself as an awesome facilitator as an awesome consultant that this company wanted to have back over and over again. I failed at that because the focus was on me. And if you want to make sure your team activities are really successful, they’ve got to be designed for everyone. You’ve got to design the experience from an other centric perspective, otherwise you run the risk of people absolutely hating whatever’s happening, which to be fair you always run that risk because in the world there are always going to be curmudgeons, critics and consumers of your work rather than contributors and really active connectors. Sometimes you just got to let that go. Some people may just not like it and that could be okay. That said, you still want to make sure that you’re designing team building that is including everyone and giving the choice, an option for people to engage at a level of their own comfort.
Pick The Right Exercise
Related to all this, the other thing about running successful team-building activities is you’ve absolutely got to pick the right exercise to match that group. Like the human knot is a really bad exercise unless you’re facilitating a bunch of wrestlers. I was reading online the other day and there’s activity called “In My Shoes” which I was like, “Oh, empathy, like wearing somebody’s shoes. That’s cool.” The activity was everybody takes off their shoes and this was spoken into like a corporate environment, everybody takes off their shoes, leaves the room, swaps teams and puts somebody else’s shoes on and they like walk around and try to like match the shoe.
I don’t know about you, I do not want to put my shoe, my feet in anybody else’s shoes. Trust me, you don’t want to put your feet in my shoes. Sometimes just based on what you’re actually doing, could be a deal breaker. One really great way to test that is to talk to somebody who’s going to be participating in the activity or a few people who are going to be participating in the activity and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. Here’s my intention in doing this. What do you think about that? Get their perspective, listen. It’s a really great way to get empathy. When people describe their perspective, you soak that in and take it into account and let it inform your design.
Challenge By Choice
Lesson number 53 on how to make team building activities really successful is make sure there is a massive dose of challenge by choice in every single thing that you’re doing. Make sure that you’re not cajoling, pushing or forcing anybody to do anything that they don’t want to team building has got to have this element of challenge by choice or pick your own poison. Participate to the level of your own comfort and maybe as a facilitator or the leader in that moment, you’re encouraging people to participate at one step beyond their comfort zone. That’s a valuable element of team development is stretching, because when you stretch you tend to learn and you tend to grow and you tend to actually develop and build your team. I’ve said this word too many times, I think I told you at the beginning of this video that I didn’t love the word “team building,” I think I’m on number 57 of actually saying that word so I’m done saying that word. If you enjoyed this video, you would love the rest of the videos on our channel. In particular, perhaps, these.