“Recover a top secret isotope from a crashed spacecraft and along the way set off an explosive while nobody is inside the indicated blast radius.” Such was the challenge laid down by “Now Get Out of That”, a BBC television show that ran from 1981 to 1984, and now considered to have laid the foundations for “Survivor” type shows that include the likes of “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here”. It was also fantastic team building, although the term then had yet to be coined.
When an organisation breaks down, it is almost invariably manifest by a serious of collapses in relationships within the organisation. Hence the importance of team building.
While it can help in avoiding frayed relationships, so it can also assist with the bottom line. For their 1993 book, “Organizational change, design and work innovation: A meta-analysis of 131 North American field experiments, 1961–1991”, authors Macy and Izumi conducted a study revealing that team development has a stronger effect on improving organisational structures than even the implementation of financial measures.
Fun is an important part of team building, but it should be remembered that the focus (and point) of the activity is for people to become productive, focused and aligned.
While team building is certainly becoming more popular for Chinese companies and many seem to understand the advantages, the methods employed are on the whole very generic in nature, with little creativity and few bespoke options available, e.g. ones tailored to a company’s specific industry and/or individual needs. There is often too much of the aforementioned fun and too little focus.
The proliferation of local team building businesses is a testament to the fact that they are, after all, pretty easy to establish. All that is needed is a search of the Internet for “team building activities”, a couple of instructors and a suitable park; one can easily come to a mutually beneficial relationship with the owners of such.
Until team building in China reaches a critical mass in terms of demand, there is therefore little reason for the suppliers to invest much more. In many ways, the term “team building” itself has become just another buzzword, also defined as “an English word that can be dropped into Chinese business conversations during meetings”. Buzzword aside, there is a lot of team building in China comprising little more than superficial activities (“team recreation”) that give employees something in the way of a morale boost, without any transfer of experience gained into the real world of work in an organisational structure.
So with all this mediocrity seeping in, again, Shanghai is where it’s at. The city’s employers are also more likely to have an open mind when it comes to offering their employees something different in the way of team building. In the middle of the city’s Pudong District, The Jinqiao Arena has Bubble Football advertised on its menu of activities; strap on one of those large see-though plastic bubbles you see children paddling, and then simply play football, albeit a little violently.
Away from de-stressing and back in more familiar team building territory, the simple act of cooking might first appear to be an oft overlooked option. Cook In Shanghai organises Chinese cooking classes that also serve as the perfect team building exercise. Classes often include a visit to a local wet market and allow hands-on training for each participant. Co-operating with colleagues to make hand pulled noodles together is surely definitive team building!
Prior to undertaking any team building activities, it is vital to set out goals. In addition to addressing company specific issues (e.g. to understand what makes good content for a story in The Nanjinger), the following are ways in which team building can bring benefit to all organisations.
1. Enable self development within teams
2. Make teams internally more innovative and harmonious (there, I said it); less in fighting
3. Increase acceptance of other view points
4. Bring about stress reduction
5. Have long lasting impact that can build success on top of success
6. Help teams to understand company values and mission more clearly
The last point is perhaps the one that resonates most as a key outcome of team building exercises, to the extent that US worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company “put[s] aside one day a year to reflect as a group on what our values mean to both our work and our lives” (www.mckinsey.com), what it calls “Values Day”.
On his company blog, Gordon Orr, McKinsey Asia Chairman based in Shanghai, described a recent Values Day; “We were given a random stack of magazines and newspapers and asked to cut images and words from them to stick to a flip chart in a way that communicated our mission and values. This is a great exercise to do at the table as you discuss what a particular word or image means for one individual and see if it also resonates with the group.”
Orr went on to add that the activity gave, “everyone at the table, from all roles in the office, the opportunity to describe what our values mean for them individually”.
Another main driver of successful team building exercises is that everyone plays a different role to that which they perform each day at the office. In the above example, the Chairman took on the role of assistant. In this way, the prior experience (or lack thereof) of each participant is much reduced while it is also becomes not so simple for each to use the normal China hierarchy as defence. With groups arranged thus into unfamiliar situations, they face challenges around what each individual member of the team can bring to the table (see side bar on page 12) in terms of common sense, natural ability or mindset.
In order to effectively implement, and learn from, team building activities, a knowledge of the contribution made by the DNA of both team members and leaders is an absolute must. Team DNA is concerned with that part of our genetic makeup as it relates to interacting with others. Both as individuals and as a collective, such DNA helps us understand strengths and weaknesses in order to make better decisions as a group. As leaders, our effectiveness is best concentrated when we know how we ourselves operate and how so do others. Such knowledge becomes absolutely invaluable in times of pressure, working to meet a deadline, we need a good idea NOW, etc.
Good team building scenarios are people levellers; “Living the learning” is the term used in team building circles to describe the situations created for participants for which each has an equal level of knowledge.
They therefore face the tasks while confronted by only their own personality, opinions and behavioural problems, while learning how to work with those of their team mates. “City Upside Down” is one of the activities offered by Chinint, a team building specialist operating in Shanghai, Xiamen, Sanya, Beijing and Hong Kong. With a creative and original approach, participants are given budget and a set of clues, and go off to experience and discover Shanghai from a different angle, through challenges to pass and secrets to unlock that lead them to locations around the city.
When back in the office, many people perform the same set tasks every day, interact with the same set of colleagues, say many of the same things to them and if lucky, vary the lunch menu a little bit. Hardly surprising then, employees who have worked together for years often confess to barely knowing each other. That’s where team building comes in. When the same colleagues are taken out of the office context and made to interact and cooperate in unfamiliar territory, their intense collaborative efforts quickly develops the relationship between them.
One of the under publicised advantages of team building exercises is the accelerated lead times. In the work place, any review of organisational decision making is muddied by there being many external factors and hundreds of variables that all play on an outcome, often over a long period of time. The undiluted team building environment, however, and its compressed time frame format provides for an excellent measure of the quality of decision making.
It is also a fact that disasters sometimes happen. In the real world work environment, they happen all the time. Team building offers a safe environment in which disasters can be made to happen, yet the consequences are limited, unlike in the real world. By being able to experience disorder, participants are able to work together to develop strategies that form a learning framework for managing this chaos.
Not to be outdone, Beijing based cultural experience provider The Hutong offers a unique collection of team building activities that could take employees along the Great Wall or up the Beijing Northern Hills. In their version of the scavenger hunt, participants must complete cultural challenges and interact with historical characters during the process. Even they also have a cooking class, leading us to wonder whether dicing and cutting with colleagues has become a team building cliché unto itself.
Back to the ‘80s and our crashed spacecraft. It may interest readers to know that “set off an explosive” was actually a euphemism for “pop a balloon”.
