Wednesday, 27 October 2010
By Alan Hunt
Look up the word "Building" in a reputable dictionary and you'll get something like "the creation or development of something over a period of time". Try the same with the "bonding" and you'll instead be rewarded with something akin to "establish a relationship or link with someone based on shared feelings, interests, or experiences". When it comes to helping teams be more effective, they both have a part to play.
Anyone responsible for a team's performance will want to ensure that as many obstacles to it doing as well as it can in any given circumstance are removed. Indeed, they'll want to go further than that and engage the team in proactive discovery of ways in which it can become every more efficient and effective. Team bonding can help with the former; team building the latter.
The closer that team members feel to one another, the more likely they are to stick together in difficult times and the smoother than more regular days will go as well. Team bonding activities can help with this. Taking our definition at the top, a bonding session is anything that the group can do together that offers them a shared experience. Old favourites like clay pigeon shooting, karting, chocolate making and so on all fall into this category. As, for that matter, do social evenings. Yes, organising a pub crawl really can help your team members get closer together! So any and all of these types of non-work time can bond a team closer.
What they won;t do is that harder, second step. To go beyond having a shared experience and move into the realms of creating or developing great team effectiveness you need to engage in team building, not bonding. As per the definition above, building equals development. That is, the team actually improves something significantly in the way it goes about its day to day business rather than simply gets its team members closer.
To be a team building session rather than a team bonding one, the activity undertaken needs to have two defining characteristics. Firstly, the action - whatever it is - needs to be something that requires team members to work together on in some way. As a simple example, getting into a kart and hammering it around a circuit is an individual affair. On the other hand, constructing a kart that is then driven around a circuit is an entirely different matter. Designing and building a vehicle capable of being driven safely by a team member will require the whole team to work together.
Secondly and most importantly, the activity agenda needs to have time set aside to reflect on what the team or teams did and how it or they went about tackling the challenge. Indeed, if the session is all about learning how to be better as a team, you should probably set aside at least as long for the debrief session as the activity itself. People often balk at this idea. Many think that a debrief session is the price you have to pay in order to be able to enjoy the activity. My experience is that a well run, structured debrief session is not only worth its weight in gold but is enjoyed every bit as much, and often more, than the activity in the first place.
In conclusion, make sure that what you select to do on your team away day matches what you want to get out of it. If it is all about having a shared experience and bringing people together, a team bonding session is the way to go. if you want more than that and have a sustained and positive impact back at work, then go for your choice of the many team building activities on offer.
Anyone responsible for a team's performance will want to ensure that as many obstacles to it doing as well as it can in any given circumstance are removed. Indeed, they'll want to go further than that and engage the team in proactive discovery of ways in which it can become every more efficient and effective. Team bonding can help with the former; team building the latter.
The closer that team members feel to one another, the more likely they are to stick together in difficult times and the smoother than more regular days will go as well. Team bonding activities can help with this. Taking our definition at the top, a bonding session is anything that the group can do together that offers them a shared experience. Old favourites like clay pigeon shooting, karting, chocolate making and so on all fall into this category. As, for that matter, do social evenings. Yes, organising a pub crawl really can help your team members get closer together! So any and all of these types of non-work time can bond a team closer.
What they won;t do is that harder, second step. To go beyond having a shared experience and move into the realms of creating or developing great team effectiveness you need to engage in team building, not bonding. As per the definition above, building equals development. That is, the team actually improves something significantly in the way it goes about its day to day business rather than simply gets its team members closer.
To be a team building session rather than a team bonding one, the activity undertaken needs to have two defining characteristics. Firstly, the action - whatever it is - needs to be something that requires team members to work together on in some way. As a simple example, getting into a kart and hammering it around a circuit is an individual affair. On the other hand, constructing a kart that is then driven around a circuit is an entirely different matter. Designing and building a vehicle capable of being driven safely by a team member will require the whole team to work together.
Secondly and most importantly, the activity agenda needs to have time set aside to reflect on what the team or teams did and how it or they went about tackling the challenge. Indeed, if the session is all about learning how to be better as a team, you should probably set aside at least as long for the debrief session as the activity itself. People often balk at this idea. Many think that a debrief session is the price you have to pay in order to be able to enjoy the activity. My experience is that a well run, structured debrief session is not only worth its weight in gold but is enjoyed every bit as much, and often more, than the activity in the first place.
In conclusion, make sure that what you select to do on your team away day matches what you want to get out of it. If it is all about having a shared experience and bringing people together, a team bonding session is the way to go. if you want more than that and have a sustained and positive impact back at work, then go for your choice of the many team building activities on offer.
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