The headlines and blogging about the Social Security Administration abusing budget dollars for a posh team building event while nearly 10% of the national workforce is struggling to obtain work really made us say, “Whoa Momma!”. 

It wasn’t just the AssHat of the Week award that prompted us to reflect on occasions when team building is simply not the right intervention for organization and/or talent development.  Our list is below.  We know it is incomplete.

1. Not all team members are included – Consider an example of ten team members:  one formal team leader, one admin, three technicians, one IT professional and four people whose roles are not clear about sales and customer service.  Out of the first three team building sessions, the admin and one of the four without a clear role simply are not present - ever.

2. One team member really needs to be cut out of the organization – We’ve all probably seen something like this in our experience.  Here’s this one person who is continuously choosing not to perform.  Rather than legally and ethically cutting that one person out of the organization, the formal team leader gives the person one more chance; and one more chance.  The latest last chance to turn around is by having everyone participate in team building.  Can we say low morale?

3. The formal leader is about to be re-assigned – The leader knows that in approximately 30-60 days she will be given a different assignment and the team roster will change.  Most of us are familiar with the four stages of team development.  We recognize that even if one team member changes the team will need to revert to the first stage called “forming”.  The timing is just not right to do team building.

4. One (or more) participant (s) really needs professional assistance – Last summer we were facilitating a session when one of the participants prompted us to raise our eyebrows.  With all sincerity, the participant whispered – in a just too loud voice – “Make sure he’s taken his medicine.”  The person to whom the participant was referring was suffering from a form of depression.  Consider the challenge of team building with a sociopath, a person with a particular phobia, a person suffering with bi-polar depression, and two people who feed off each other by demonstrating passive-aggressive behavior.  Team building probably isn’t the right intervention.

Our turn to whisper:  Check your knowledge about abnormal psychology by taking this quiz.

5. The right participants are not selected – Over and over again, we need to ask, “Who is the team?”  Sometimes thirty people may be invited, in a good intention to be inclusive, when the team that needs to be developed actually consists of eleven people.  The head-turning news that the Social Security Administration sent 700 managers and their spouses to the Arizona Biltmore at a cost of nearly $750K catches everyone’s eye because we cannot resist asking, “This is a team?  700 people?  Really?”

And speaking of numbers and headlines, we reflect on our own blog offering:  Five Occasions When Team Building is Misguided. There’s gotta be more than five.

Tags: 700 managers, Arizona Biltmore, AssHat, four stages of team development, SSA, team building

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 7:42 am and is filed under Here's your change.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.