The presentation you gave at the CFI leadership conference was incredibly eye-opening, practical, and engaging, and I thank you for that. Because of the resources and guidance you offered, I now feel well-equipped and excited to lead my student groups next semester!
Within the team building and managerial leadership world there is so much information and Jargon Monoxide that everyone feels overwhelmed. The challenge is determining what works within organizations is complex. Beliefs, false ideas, reinforced negative theories of work, personal fallacies about competence, improper systems in place for promotions, onboarding and hiring.
Without a Shared Goal or a what am I doing here? what are you doing here? what are we expected to accomplish? – defined as a what by when. People will choose what they feel is best, or they choose what those around that feel is right.
By having people do something (not too scary or different) that appears to be novel or unique may be a sufficient change to break their “stuckness in thinking” or the existing patterns of behavior the team exhibits. Once we can shift behavior patterns people sometimes see better, novel, more innovative ways of doing their work.
Many of the team building activities in the article are bad and funny. I would argue that most of them are bad managers trying hard to do what they think is right. Unfortunately bad management can be tough to fix … and team building can be abused.
Having people do something familiar, like working to solve a shared problem, in what seems like a unique or novel way, using a team building activity. You open the number and variation of choices that they may have available, therefore breaking a causal action belief.
Work has the power to be a healing place with mutual trust behaviors or a place of pain with trust repelling behaviors. My argument is that everyone wants to do their best work & have high mutual trust attracting workplaces. They just don’t know what they don’t know, or are working from a bad theory of work.
Prior to assuming that “we have strong personalities” and removing (or abdicating) the accountability & authority of the direct manager to an external assessment several questions need to be answered.
All work returns to two questions.
What am I doing here? and Who are you?
Using personality or behavior assessments (DiSC, MBTI, Big 5, etc.) continually reinforces the false belief that people are the problem and they are not good enough being who they are.