Most of the popular “team building exercises” honestly kind of suck.
My sense is that this is something that a lot of us struggle with.
Team building has come up in a few coaching sessions lately. With clients in a 6 month coaching package, our conversations sparked new ideas that led to some really great experiences. In a one-shot coaching session, it felt like the client was a little disappointed that I didn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution.
There are a lot of people out there who will happily sell you that solution:
- Have your team take this assessment together for just $50 per person!
- Do an “Escape Room” exercise together!
- Host a yoga session in the middle of your staff development day!
- Do a ropes course together!
And then, of course, any search engine will serve up plenty of lists of games and exercises that you can try for free with your team.
Incorporating some time to play board games or do a puzzle together during your staff development day isn’t necessarily bad – especially if you make it clear that it’s entirely optional, not forced fun time.
But what does that actually accomplish?
It’s nice to get to know your team members as people, and maybe even become friends with some of them.
But friendship doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to work well together.
Picking on just my own experience, I worked in a library with a lot of internal divisions. Those of us in instruction silently grumbled about the tech services folks every time we hit a broken link in a database during a one-shot. They found just as many reasons to grumble about us.
Staff grumbled about faculty who they never saw doing anything, because we were in our offices or a classroom or a meeting across campus or working from home. Faculty grumbled about staff who didn’t appreciate just how much work goes into lesson planning and building tutorials and selecting books and drafting our own presentations and publications and all of the other stuff that goes into our work.
Socializing and talking about what we like to do outside of work didn’t address any of those issues.
“Having fun” together didn’t help us understand how all of our work fit together.
Instead, it just made it hurt more when I found out some of the things staff had to say about faculty, including me.
I thought we were cool, but here you are accusing me of not caring as much about students because you don’t see me sitting at a service desk every day? [Insert defensive reaction slinging mud right back.]
It made those divisions feel more personal, and therefore more hurtful, instead of easier to bridge.
Effective team-building requires shared purpose and priorities
That takes a lot more work to build than just some one-day exercise.
What your path needs to look like depends on where you’re starting from.
If your leadership team already has a clearly defined vision and strategic plan, then your next step may be to plan an exercise that helps you communicate these priorities with your team, and helps them get a clearer sense of which pieces they’re contributing to the puzzle and how they all fit together.
If you don’t have that clear vision and strategic plan, then you’ll need to start there, and incorporate your team as much as possible into the discussions that shape your future.
If you’re stuck in the middle between vision-less administrators and a team that needs a clear direction, then you’ll need to figure out what you can actually do. I know, that’s clear as mud 😂. But this depends entirely on your context and whether those vision-less admins are negligent or micromanagers.
Wherever you’re starting from, actively listening to your team members is a crucial part of that process.
Embracing your curiosity is a crucial part of that process.
To function as an effective team, your team members need to:
- Feel heard and valued,
- Feel a sense of psychological safety,
- Understand what’s expected of them and why their work matters,
- Understand what the bigger picture is,
- And trust that everyone is contributing important pieces of that puzzle.
Before you commit to a team-building exercise, ask yourself how it will build any of those components.
(Some assessments and other exercises can be effective here, but that depends on how they’re used. When treated like a one-shot, they won’t do much for you.)
Where is your team strongest and weakest in these 5 components?
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But coaching can help.
If you need confidential support to help you untangle what’s going on with your team and plan a strategy that’s custom designed for your context, let’s talk about what a coaching package could look like.
Schedule a free, no-obligation conversation!
Building your own coaching skills can also be incredibly valuable in
- helping your team members feel heard and valued,
- building psychological safety,
- helping individual team member set clear priorities and goals,
- and facilitating conversations about your unit’s priorities and goals.
Right now, I’m leaning toward scheduling the 2026 cohort of Lead With Curiosity to start in June, but I won’t set that for sure until January. Until the dates are set, the wait list form includes questions about what timing will work best for you.
Sign up for the wait list!
Leave a Reply