When are you not building your team ?

I recently came across another blog describing all the fantastic things that happen in a team building setting. Some of what I read really disturbed me ... A few extracts about the benefits of a team building exercise:

" - on creativity: team building activities help your employees to have fun and relax. They forget about work pressure for some time. This improves creativity.
- on motivation: employees interact in a different setting outside the work environment and this helps them to loosen up a little and winning competitions boosts their confidence levels. It also helps employees to gain trust and work as a team.
- on communication: the communication capability of your employees improves a great deal as they participate in team building activities. When your employees experience improvements in all of the above areas, their productivity automatically increases.

"

Wow ... So work is full of pressure, trust is missing and communication is a disaster. But we'll all go out for a team building exercise (typically outsourced to HR or a third party 'professional') and then all this tension will disappear and your team comes back ready to rock and deliver stellar performance !

You do not build a team once or twice a year. You build a team every single time you interact with any or all of the team members. In the meetings you have. In the one-on-one discussions. Or the project work. If work is boring and people are not having fun, you'd better do something about that. Or if people stab each other in the back, and put spokes in each other's wheels, you'd better not wait for the annual team building retreat to address these issues. In fact, if anything, all the 'good stuff' that team building supposedly brings will be looked upon as fake and just some gold dust that management wants to spread around.

Be aware that there is no single moment that you do NOT build your team, by whatever you do or say, or what your team members do and say together.

Do you measure yourself ?

What gets measured gets done. Not very sure if it was Lord Kelvin or Peter Drucker. And although I have often reminded others about the importance of identifying a target and measuring progress against it, I recently realised I was not applying my own medicine ...

I am working on a PhD dissertation. It will for sure be great and exciting once it will all be finished. But for now, it is tedious, hard and to be honest ... quite boring. I have to listen to and analyze hours and hours of recordings that will allow me to confirm the main assumptions of my dissertation. I got started rather energetically some weeks ago. But that enthousiasm dwindled once I realized how much time all this was taking. Progress just seemed so terribly slow. I quite frankly though about whether I would ever get through all the listening and analyzing. Whenever I got back to work on my tedious never-ending list of tasks, I quickly gave up feeling that it wasn't really making a difference.

 And that's when I reminded myself about what I had applied to any type of performance goal for so many years: visualise and measure. So I created my only-to-myself meaningful visual of all the work ahead of me (and the little that was behind me), which ended up looking like little circles and bigger pizzas. Everytime I finished a new chunk I quickly colored in the corresponding space on the sheet. Doing this didn't make any of the actual work go faster, or even made it less boring ... ! But it created a level of motivation of 'seeing' the progress. And I am now capable of measuring my overall progress towards the goal of completion of all the work. As of this writing, I am at 76%. I am pretty sure measuring 'myself' in this way has helped to keep up the motivation.

We all know that what gets measured gets done. But think about applying this as well to personal goals and projects !