The top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time
Here’s how some companies do team building:
Employees [of Californian home security company] Alarm One Inc. were paddled with rival companies’ yard signs as part of a contest that pitted sales teams against each other, according to court documents.
The winners poked fun at the losers, throwing pies at them, feeding them baby food, making them wear diapers and swatting their buttocks.
The good news: The company got paddled in court when an employee sued them and had to cough up 1.7 million USD.
The bad news: A lot of team building events borrow elements from this approach, setting up artificial (and often meaningless) contests pitting coworkers against each other.
This is especially ironic because companies today want their employees to cooperate more, to work well in teams, to share knowledge and to work to achieve success together. That is why it makes absolutely no sense to send them on trainings that are mainly competitive in nature. Even when these events let people work together in smaller teams, competing against other teams, the focus still ends up being on competition, not cooperation.
There’s a simple reason why these events are almost always competitive: Competition = instant passion. Setting up a competition activates a primal urge in many people to win at all costs, making them very focused and active – which looks great to the organizers.
But there’s a huge downside to this – which means that not only are many team building events a huge waste of time, they can be actively harmful to teams.
Here are the top 5 problems with competitive team building events.
1: Competition does not create an experience of success
Yes, someone will win – most people won’t. If the entire focus is on competing and winning, most participants will leave with a sense that “we weren’t good enough.” That’s not really a good feeling to have created in your employees.
2: Competition brings out the worst in people
CEO Hal Rosenbluth was just about to hire an executive with all the right skills, the right personality and the perfect CV. His interviews went swimmingly and he’d said all the right things, but something about him still made Rosenbluth nervous, though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.
Rosenbluth’s solution was genius: He invited the applicant to a company softball game, and here the man showed his true colors. He was competitive to the point of being manic. He abused and yelled at both the opponents and his own team. He cursed the referees and kicked up dirt like a major league player.
And he did not get the job.
(From Hal Rosenbluth’s excellent book The Customer Comes Second).
Competing brings out the inner jerk in some people, making them manic and abusive. Some even try cheating in order to win. This is not exactly a great basis for future cooperation – it might be better if people left the event liking each other more than before because they’d seen each other at their best and most likable.
3: People learn less when they’re competing
Studies show that we learn less when we compete and more when we cooperate. Here’s an example from education:
In a comprehensive review of 245 classroom studies that found a significant achievement difference between cooperative and competitive environments, David Johnson and Roger Johnson of the University of Minnesota reported that 87 percent of the time the advantage went to the cooperative approach.
In visiting classrooms where cooperative learning is used, I like to ask students to describe the experience in their own words. One ten-year-old boy thought a moment and replied, “It’s like you have four brains.” By contrast, a competitor’s single brain often shuts off when given no reason to learn except to triumph over his or her classmates.
- Alfie Kohn (Source)
4: Competition lowers performance
And contrary to what most people think, most of us perform worse when we’re competing. This is especially true for complex tasks that require us to work with and learn from other people.
5: Waste of time
These events focus more on finding and rewarding winners than on making sure that people learn something that might actually be useful at work.
This creates a sense that the events are a waste of time, and employees come to resent them because they keep them from doing real, actual, useful work.
How to do team building that actually builds teams
Here’s what the result of a good team building event should be:
- A deeper understanding between co-workers
- Co-workers like each other better than before
- An experience of having performed well together
- A feeling that “we’re good at what we do”
- An increased desire to cooperate and help each other out
- Specific learnings that can be applied at work
- And maybe most of all: A sense that the event was “time well spent.”
This would actually be easy to achieve. We’d just have to change the event so that:
- The event has common goals for all participants, making people cooperate, not compete
- The event rewards those who get good results but also those who help others get good results and those who help make it a nice experience for everyone
- You take plenty of time to let participants reflect on how the learnings from the event can be applied in their work
You may not get the same hectic moody you get from those intensely competitive events – but that’s actually a good thing.
What you would get instead is an event that is more fun for more people – and much more useful. That has to be a good thing!
Your take
What’s the best team building event you’ve ever tried? Or the worst? How did it help or hinder your team? What would your ideal team building event look like?
Please write a comment, I’d like to know what you think.
Mathematics Education Blog » Blog Archive » The top 5 problems with corporate team building Said,
October 26, 2007 @ 11:15 am
[...] newsdesk: [...]
Peter Said,
October 26, 2007 @ 11:24 am
How about creativity?
Have 2 teams, give them a wacky situation and ask them to find the “Win-Win or no deal” outcome of that wacky situation.
Or if need be for a competition… make it a joke contest. Use small but meaningful rewards… like the funniest man/woman gets rewarded with a week of being pampered… something like the boss will give him his/her personal assistant for a week to help him.
Zac Said,
October 26, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
Nit-pick re: #2 — they’re called “umpires” in softball, not referees. Team-building exercises are a bunch of crap; most people participate for two reasons — they’re afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t, or else they’d rather be doing ANYTHING else than their jobs.
Wendy Johnson Said,
October 26, 2007 @ 6:24 pm
Thank you for this point of view. Its one I’ve shared for years.
At Center for Courageous Enterprise, we don’t do team building; we build community. We are leadership development consultants, and one of our core products is a 3-day experience that includes spending one entire day in Mexico building a home for a family in need.
Doing something together, from start to finish, where no one is an expert, allows the experience to be rich in learning as well as building a strong community. The experience of doing something significant together brings out the best in people even when they are stretched to their limits.
We begin to see what others bring to the workplace that would have been previously overlooked. Our leadership skills are tested and refined under stressors of limited time, resources and talent (sounds like your office, right?)
At the end of the day, you are exhausted, dirty, maybe a little achy, but when you stand in front of the finished house and hand the family the key, you know you have done something significant.
Then, we go back into the workspace and being the process of applying that learning to our everyday experiences. We think it is three days that change lives.
Not everyone can do that, but every community has a project that needs help. Build a playground, paint a community center, volunteer in an Alzheimer’s day care, or work in soup kitchen. Don’t just play together for fun; do something remarkable and have fun doing it.
Miranda Said,
October 26, 2007 @ 7:14 pm
I was so glad to see this post, so thank you Alex. I wanted to point out one other thing that competitive team building does – it singles certain people (individuals) out as losers. I once worked in a place where we went bowling for our team building. I am a terrible bowler. I cannot get the point of it. I was placed on a team of inveterate bowlers, and our team lost because my performance was so poor. I was awarded with a booby prize and everyone at this small company made fun of me. This experience united the team through bullying a scapegoat. Since then, I have done everything I could to get out of team-building activities. I try to schedule a day off, an offsite meeting, anything so I will not have to go through this again. I’d rather be on the fringes of the team than be humiliated again.
MyNameIsMatt Said,
October 27, 2007 @ 2:18 am
Team building has little to do with competition, so I definitely agree that competition makes little sense if team building is your real goal. Good results in competition (or when doing actual work) are the result of good teamwork and previous work towards building a team, not from having pressure and being thrown into the gauntlet. Even sports teams practice between games without the complete pressure to perform.
Practice is the essence of improvement. Competition is the display of what’s been gained through practice, so trying to improve a team through competition is just backwards. Coordinating and communicating well are the foundations of good teamwork. Communication improves when people have shared common experiences, and coordination improves when teams struggle together (finding the ways we all bend and twist in different situations).
I think organizers believe competition provides both chances for shared experiences and pushes teams, but that’s isn’t the same as improving communication and improving coordination. Practice is still required, and practice requires focus and failure. Pressure to win means failure is bad, but that’s wrong. You need people to be relaxed and feel safe to fail, trusting the people around them to support and not discourage. Without that, we’re too afraid to learn from our failures, to learn our limits, and figure out what we should improve, and to let others helps us through that.
Competition is about results, and not improvement. You can’t manifest something that doesn’t exist, so you practice first, and perform second. That’s what’s good for team building.
Stephen S Said,
October 27, 2007 @ 6:45 am
I’ve actually found our retrospectives to be fairly helpful in team building. I started a job at a new company some 3 months ago, and about 4 weeks in I suggested they start the practice. After their first retrospective, they came up with some pretty good ideas about how to work better together.
Now, they never actually got around to implementing those specific practices, but you could see they started to gel more — people implicitly trusted each other to make the right choices when before they always second guessed each other. A lot of time in the retrospective is spent collaborating to find the weak spots in the company process, so they naturally fall into a habit of working together to solve problems. It’s quite a useful thing. :-)
I started doing retrospectives 3 jobs ago, and almost always get the same results. This book helped me a lot, and I bet many of the exercises work great on teams that aren’t necessarily in software: http://www.pragprog.com/titles/dlret
Jarkko Laine - Insanely interested » Blog Archive » Insanely Interesting Links: PageRank, Posting Less and Great Blog Posts Said,
October 27, 2007 @ 11:00 am
[...] The top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time: The Chief Happiness Officer writes about an important topic, cultivating competition at the work place. It’s not uncommon at all to hear management say things like “we need to have some friendly competition to get the most out of your creativity”. But as Alexander points out in this post, competition is never a good option when you are trying to build up a good team spirit. [...]
Debbie Said,
October 27, 2007 @ 10:27 pm
I like the retrospectives idea in the comment above. Most people don’t want to look at what went wrong or even what went right! They are too afraid that they might have to change what they normally do on a day to day basis, regardless of whether it works or not! I work in a ‘team’ but in practice, all that means is, we all do similar work at a similar time in the year. I long for us to have a good look at what , how and why we do something and together, come up with positives to move forward. I really do believe that a group of people can find solutions and have fun together but as yet, I have to find an opportunity to explore this in my current workplace.People need to see a benefit to themselves before they will commit to trying something new or making extra effort.
Viv McWaters Said,
October 28, 2007 @ 11:03 am
For me improv is the very best team-building ever. The principles of improv build community, confidence, collaboration and are fun! What more could you want? Plus you exercise your spontaneity muscle and can carry the stuff you learn in improv into all walks of life. Oh – those principles:
- accept offers, say ‘yes!’
- look after your partner
- let go of outcomes
- do something
- be obvious (be average)
- take risks
Cheers Viv
Scott McArthur Said,
October 28, 2007 @ 11:33 am
We came up with the idea “48″. In this the “team” are given 48 hours to solve a particular problem being faced by a charity, hotel etc. The whole event is filmed in 24 style! Works a treat on paper!
Tom Heck Said,
October 29, 2007 @ 4:11 pm
I once consulted with a growing software development firm. The company leaders understood they had teaming issues.
The previoius “teambuilding” was a whitewater rafting trip with a get drunk party in the evening. Not surprisingly that didn’t work so well. Nobody said anything though because it was the CEO’s idea.
Two years later things are even worse. Amazingly the management team waited until things were really bad to address the issues.
The CEO pushed for the idea that one day of teambuilding was all they needed. The CEO was a long distance runner and raced in marathons. I asked him how often he trained so he could run competitively. He said he trained every day. I told him teams are the same way. Teams have to train regularly to perform well. He didn’t buy it. “I pay these people lots of money and they damn well better know how to work with each other or I’ll fire them.”
Can you imagine what it was like working on that team? Can you imagine doing any kind of “teambuilding” event with this team? It wold be like trying to run the latest version of PhotoShop on a Windows 95 machine. Nothing they tried worked. All teambuilding attempts were hugely frustrating. The CEO and the management team came to the conclusion that “teambuilding doesn’t work”. The emperor has no clothes.
99% of “teambuilding” is ineffective because it is treated as a stand alone event. It’s not tied into the company culture. There is no follow up.
Imagine walking into a health and fitness facility and proclaiming you’re ready to get fit and then saying you have one, maybe two days to invest in your fitness. This approach would be a waist of resources (though the facility would still take your money).
If you want to get fit it’s best if you create a plan that is in harmony with your goals. Know how this fits into your long term vision for your health. Commit to consistant action and know you are embarking on a life changing experience. Fit and healthy is now who you are. It’s your new identitiy (not a flash in the pan).
A similar approach could apply to teams. But that’s not what we see in teambuilding. What we see is a trip to a ropes course (or white water rafting) once a year and say “Yes, we do teambuilding!”
And we blame teambuilding for this?
Ask M Said,
October 29, 2007 @ 5:54 pm
I think the idea of doing a co-operative project as a team building exercise is great.
At my first job a very large group of us spent the day cleaning and re-painting the pavilion at a local sports ground, so it could be used by neighbourhood children. No competing, but an excellent opportunity to work together as a team and get to grips with each other’s strengths and weaknesses. And if someone needed a bit of space – they went outside and picked snails off a damp wall that was going to be re-painted.
And as well, it brought long-lasting benefit to the local community.
So I agree with Wendy – make team building events something that not only brings the team together but is worthwhile in itself.
Jon Emmons Said,
October 30, 2007 @ 2:44 am
A great article as always Alex. I have to agree with Miranda’s comment above. There’s a lot of pressure to perform for your team in this type of event and it’s easy to end up with one team that looses and then even have most of the people on the winning team not feel like they performed up to snuff!
A few things I would encourage people to consider for team building:
First, try to take the pressure out of it for all the reasons Alex mentions above.
Second, try to keep it loosely structured. For example, a trip to a baseball game is great because it gives everyone a common experience but also leaves plenty of time to chat and get to know each other.
Third, involve everyone! You’re not going to get everyone all the time but it’s important to do things that everyone is able to do. It’s fine to encourage people to go slightly out of their comfort zone, but don’t plan an event that you know certain people won’t go to.
Fourth, have at least some of your team building/social events during work hours. Lunches can be a great opportunity for this. The important thing is to involve the people who may not make it to after work events.
You can’t force people to have fun, but you can certainly give them the opportunity. Honestly the best team building experiences I can remember have been practical jokes – always in the best of humor of course. It may seem unlikely, but you’d be surprised how many people want to help when you say you’re going to fill the CEO’s office with balloons!
Life After Coffee » Competitive team building Said,
October 30, 2007 @ 3:05 am
[...] Kjerulf, the Chief Happiness Officer has a (typically excellent) article pointing out the top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time. Companies today want their employees to cooperate more, to work well in teams, to share knowledge [...]
Recommended Reading at Race in the Workplace - how diversity, race and racism influence our working lives Said,
October 30, 2007 @ 2:37 pm
[...] The top 5 reasons why most team building events are a waste of time – Chief Happiness Officer “[C]ompanies today want their employees to cooperate more, to work well in teams, to share knowledge and to work to achieve success together. That is why it makes absolutely no sense to send them on trainings that are mainly competitive in nature. Even when these events let people work together in smaller teams, competing against other teams, the focus still ends up being on competition, not cooperation.” [...]
Tom Page Said,
October 30, 2007 @ 6:12 pm
As the general manager of a contracting firm, I am involved with a variety of technicians with very different skills. It’s hard trying to forge a team when each person does not understand what the other person does. The approach I’ve used in some cases is have a competition between the technicians and management, meaning me. I challenge them to find and repair problems before I can. The wager usually involves me buying lunch. I ALWAYS LOSE. I then congratulate the TEAM and tell them what a great job everyone did. By having the different specialties work together to ensure I don’t find a problem, WE build a team that depends on one another to spot problems, assist each other with solutions and the customer receives a better product in a timely manner. I rarely hear “It’s not my job.” anymore.
Ask a Manager Said,
October 31, 2007 @ 1:00 am
I’m a huge opponent of these team-building events. They just strike me as a huge waste of time — as well as a bit of a farce. If you want to build your team, give them the conditions to thrive in — resources, good coworkers, etc. If you have that, you don’t need contrived events. If you don’t have that, nothing will help.
Very Disco Said,
October 31, 2007 @ 1:42 am
Worst team building ever…manager set up chairs in a close semi-circle, then watched to see who sat in other chairs outside the circle. Apparently, where you chose to sit determined whether or not you were part of the team. Well and good, except that I happen to be a rather larger-sized person and I need a little more room than a cramped semi-circle of chairs provides. I found myself arbitrarily “not a part of the team” according to him because I take up a little more room and was trying to be considerate of the others on my team. What an asinine assumption anyway!!! My team knows that I am a part and an outsider has no credibility to determine this based on a lame exercise. Managers need to be very careful with how their employees perceive these kind of things because someone’s feelings can easily get hurt.
Borislav Dopudja Said,
October 31, 2007 @ 1:46 pm
Great article.
Modern Worker Said,
October 31, 2007 @ 8:45 pm
LOL, the graphic made my day :)
joel Rambaud Said,
October 31, 2007 @ 9:21 pm
Pissa team building and such trick to built a team doeas not work and will never work , every team need a leader . …..
Novel idea ….. best team had strong leader regardless which category they fit in .
Leigh Said,
October 31, 2007 @ 9:56 pm
Best best best offsite ever (and frankly i hate most of them – complete wastes of time) was by a fellow here in Canada named Min Basadur
http://www.basadur.com/
we had 60 of the most cynical under 25 year old why are you wasting my timers who got hooked by minute 2 and all came out saying not only did they love his workshop but learned something about themselves and their coworkers along the way.
I kid you not…the site looks cheesy but Min is amazing….
Shirley Said,
October 31, 2007 @ 11:26 pm
Alex,
Thanks so much for this post. I support the idea of team building, but agree with you that it is very ineffectual in these competitions. Usually the same people who “takeover” at work meetings and loudly express their opinions e are automatically appointed leaders at these games.
The comments from all your readers are wonderful. I think you’ve opened a can of worms here. Hopefully this will really stimulate people’s thinking and some new creative ideas to not only practice teambuilding, but to use it in practice every day. Keep up the great work!
Curtis “The Lassam” Lassam » “Related Posts” - A Blog User-Retention Technique Said,
November 1, 2007 @ 1:01 am
[...] browsing Reddit at work like any well-motivated employee might be doing.. when I happen across this article about corporate team building. Now, I don’t know why, but I always enjoy this kind of [...]
Rob Said,
November 1, 2007 @ 8:40 pm
I think I would add “Trust” to your list of results from a team building event. I think a key part of a performing team is a strong sense of trust. We did have some success with an event for our internal group of 30 or so people. We decided to get out and go to a place that is really geared towards kids. We split into six teams competing in very silly competitions. An obstacle course through an inflatable course, dodge ball, and paint ball competitions. Everyone really had a lot of fun and we still talk about that trip today. Letting your guard and your hair down together can go a long way towards building trust.
Team building the right way : AccMan Said,
November 2, 2007 @ 6:39 am
[...] why I was uplifted by a fantastic story from the Chief Happiness Officer. The blog post itself is less important than the stories that followed. I was struck by this from Wendy Johnson who said: At Center for [...]
Misha Said,
November 3, 2007 @ 2:45 pm
“These events focus more on finding and rewarding winners than on making sure that people learn something that might actually be useful at work.”
Absolutelly agree – teambuilding when someone is awarded a prize, with winning as a main im of teambuilding is useless. We have done it only once and non-winning people were more disappointed than if we would lower their wages.
Ben Said,
November 6, 2007 @ 10:54 pm
When we celebrated customer service week last month, some of the fun games directed at team-building really backfired. We had a competition to decorate a box with a theme related to work. Getting buy-in to start the design was hard enough, but we had some that were over-zealous. They were so sure the winner was their box, they talked trash before the contest began, which was judged by three people in the company completely unrelated to our area. The result? A different team won and this team was angry and disbelieving. It became a “everyone is against us” type of attitude. Several other games like brain teasers and word search pages resulted in people being upset for one reason or another.
We thought they were good ideas. You can’t please everyone, but at least please the majority, right? Now the coordinator from this year is insistent they will never do it again.
Your article did stimulate an idea for me though. In confidence, give each person a piece of a puzzle. The puzzle could be a picture, sentence, whatever you like. The object is to tell them there is a goal to meet and the team will be rewarded. The trick is that they must communicate and work together to piece the puzzle together. Some small reward for the whole team would be done, perhaps lunch or something. What do you think?
matt m Said,
November 11, 2007 @ 7:55 am
Worst ever: Paintball. People getting excited about being able to literally inflict pain upon people they disliked weeks before the event was enough to convince me not to go…
E3 Team Building Said,
November 29, 2007 @ 6:01 pm
Just stumbled across this – very good article. Traditional team building activities often don’t get people working together, as you say. We have devised a very unique and creative approach to get people working together rather than competing – we enable people to produce their own show! We’ve had great results – staff learn from the workshops and there is none of the competitive element associated with ‘games’ focused events. Please take a look at our site if you are interested.
Thanks,
J
Stephen Mackintosh Said,
February 19, 2008 @ 5:33 am
I see that many advise that using competition is a poor way to building a team. Hmmmm, with no purpose, plan, presence, preparation and process, I would agree. But with diligence it does work quite well. Some times to grow a team you have to expose it. Competition can expose it quite well and coaching it can help curb what could be/is a problem back in the workplace, but is left unsaid. Do I see an elephant in the room? Video tape the team in action..then let the replay speak for itself.
Amazing as it is, no matter how rough, gruff and competitive certain team members are, most of them are “real people” and benefit greatly when helped to understand/see their their effect on the team.
Spymasters Said,
July 18, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
Great post, standard team building days do generally fill employees with dread. Spymasters is our version of a team building event that lets teams track a ‘target’ through planting bugs, solving clues etc – bit more exciting and does set out to improve team performance rather than being like the scenario with the diapers you mentioned in your post!
I’ve added the link below in case you’re interested in seeing what we do.
http://www.spymasters.org/package_platinum.php
Zomy Hernandez Said,
August 4, 2008 @ 8:22 pm
This is a great post. As one of the leading team building companies I would just like to say how much we can relate to your post. Our nameless/rankless debrief program actually requires everyone on the team to set aside their status, their rankings, in order to get down to the real issues. This encourages everyone to freely admit their success and errors.
Rich Sovich Said,
September 2, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
Competition is what the free market is all about. I agree with much of the ideas as presented, however competition that is not between co-workers may provide an excellent opportunity to develop teaming. When you can relate the “competition” to real company (market) threats, the heightened sense of dependency upon teammates to assurance that the “team” succeeds is enhanced and the money spent on such events is actually preparing workers to succeed in the battle of everyday business. With the competition that companies face in today’s world, this type of training may make the difference.
Rhonda J Said,
December 11, 2008 @ 12:26 am
My IT team had a team-building day yesterday. Maybe it does say something about me, but the day left me feeling really awful about myself and quite angry with the whole thing. Another girl – who is a terrific worker as well as being well-liked by all – was in tears at one point. How can this sort of thing be helpful? We had to play this silly game that involved clans. Each clan had a bag full of items and a couple of clues – we were then told we had to make 650 dollars and the game started. It was fun at the time, but the problem was the facilitator. After the game ended he put everyone into one of 4 quadrants – and then extrapolated how this means we would perform and act in the workplace. I just didn’t see how you can make these assumptions based on a stupid game with no rules.
Edward "DJ Big Ed" Said,
March 12, 2009 @ 3:39 am
Hello and good day. I am a professional DJ in the greater Pittsburgh Pennsylvania area. I am looking to expand my corporate DJ business by offering team building projects that are easy enough to offer at a company picnic, etc. I am also a Christian and believe in running a business with high morals and business ethics. I agree with your post, on doing events the right way.
My question is, where would I go to learn how to run different team building games? Do you offer such a class, course, book, or video?
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Management Friday: Stop the Squabbling « The Mama Bee Said,
April 27, 2009 @ 3:16 pm
[...] Top 5 reasons most team-building events are a waste of time from the Chief Happiness Officer. [...]