The title isn’t clickbait. There is one question that I would argue is better than a thousand hours of team building. If you lead a team, a group, or any community, and you would love for them to be more cohesive, this could save you a whole heap of headache, effort, and wasted time at happy hours, bowling parties, and whatever else.
The Problem with Bowling Nights and Happy Hours
Having worked with some of the smartest teams around the world, what I’ve learned is that pretty much every team would like their group to be a little bit more cohesive and a little bit more high-performing. Yet when I look at the agenda of how this happens, it’s like we do these big off-sites, or we go bowling, or there’s a happy hour.
There’s nothing wrong with bowling. My wife really likes bowling. However, it can be slightly manipulative excuse for team bonding.
If we were all hyper-transparent, it’d be like, “Hey, everybody, I’m going to take you bowling so that you get to know each other better…so that you work better together…so that there’s less conflict, and so that you communicate better.” No boss is ever going to say that, right?
But the reason you would do things outside of work fundamentally links back, to some degree, to what’s happening at work. Here’s the problem with that. That’s one hour a quarter, or that’s three hours a quarter. You then spend 40 hours a week together.
So if you want to outpace or outperform a thousand hours of team building, you can just roll that in, because you’re going to work roughly a thousand hours together in half a year. In six months, you’re going to spend a thousand hours working together. The average work year is 2,000 hours.
Working Together Is Team Building
I think what a lot of people overlook is the fact that working together is team building. With typical team building activities for work, you go to an off-site, you solve a puzzle or a problem. But at work, you’re just solving puzzles and problems with each other all the time.
The problem is that an experienced team development facilitator is trained to lead a group through an experience, a bit of a simulation of something. But that experience alone doesn’t teach anything. It’s in the reflection afterward. At work, very rarely do we do this. We’re busy. We’re going from thing to thing. We don’t actually pause to reflect on the experience.
The One Question That Outpaces It All
The one question that I would argue would outpace a thousand hours of team building is really simple: “What struck you about…” and then fill in the thing that’s happening at work.
The big presentation from the big boss that rolled out the new strategy. Getting people into small groups. My friend and mentor, Peter Block, would say that small groups are the units of transformation.
As I’m working with a bunch of chiefs of staff at Google, they’re organizing an event for a thousand people, rolling out all this new stuff. But the real change in team development and performance is going to happen as soon as that presentation from the execs ends. People are going to group up in their little cohorts of three to five people that they know and start gossiping and sharing good, bad, and otherwise news and information.
As the leader of a team, if you sit people down and you’re like, “Hey, that was a lot of stuff. I want to just have a 15-minute stand-up, and I’d love to ask you, what struck you? What really stuck out to you about that experience?” and you take time to listen to each other, what it is, is a constant, thoughtful, not super-invasive pulse check into how things are going for you right now at work.
How are you doing? What are you thinking about? What’s important to you? What struck you? What rose to the top for you?
Now you don’t find yourselves, a year later, wondering what somebody’s thinking about this job because, all along, you’ve been checking in and asking, “What struck you?”
A Conversation Starter That Doesn’t Need a Meeting
If nothing else from this video, take this question, put it into your back pocket, and toss it out whenever you feel like a check-in. The framing and architecture of the question, “What struck you?” is far better than an open-ended, “Hey, let’s have a check-in one-on-one.”
It can also save you a lot of time because it can happen in a hallway chat while you’re walking somewhere. It doesn’t need to be a meeting scheduled on your calendar.
Want 60 More Questions That Move Your Team Forward?
Two quick things you might love. If one question wasn’t enough and you want 60 more, there’s a free printable version of all these questions that I’ve put together that’s specifically designed to actually edit the future in some way. You can download the free printable deck and other resources here.
One of the best ways to build a team is to actually ask a question that moves a group forward. When you only ask about stories and the past, not everybody wants to dive into that all the time at work. But when you start talking about, “What are you looking forward to?” it gives these really great anchors for people to check in. That’s exactly what the Future Focused We! Connect Cards are designed to do, and you can grab the physical deck or a free printable sample at weand.me/tools.
And if you’re a super nerd and you’re still reading, you would love what happens in December. I gather several hundred practitioners, master connectors who professionally gather groups and work on making teams more cohesive. You will learn and experience a ton of super practical inspiration at that gathering. Want to go deeper? Register your interest for the Connectors Summit this December, a live experience where facilitators, trainers, and leaders come together to practice, connect, and reset.
I’m Chad Littlefield. Have an awesome day.
