Part of the Team

In my professional life, I have been exposed from time to time to team building programs. I am referring to the kind of exercise that management puts into place to get the members of a work group to "bond" together. Maybe someone in charge reads in the business press about a company whose employees go mountain climbing together, or run marathons together, or operate soup kitchens in their spare time on weekends, and the writer of the story manages to get a quote from someone at that firm who claims that their financial success is closely tied to the familial intra-mural employee bonding that these outside activities provide. They quote homilies like "We're like a family", whatever that means in a culture with a 50% divorce rate. Management then thinks that they should get their own employees to do things together, and that wealth and success will soon follow.

The programs can take many forms. Innocuous ones are monthly gourmet lunch clubs, goofy once-a-year bowling nights, etc., but some can intrude into personal lives like weekend-long retreats or after hours social activities. When they conflict with personal lives, they can do a lot of damage to a team's spirit, the opposite of the original intent. If you are more or less forced to attend a pub night at which you have to listen to your colleagues talk about work at a time when you could think of at least 100 better things to do, you will not go into the office the next morning with a warm glow in your heart towards your boss or your cubicle comrades. Fortunately, the vast majority of these efforts die a mercifully quick natural death, but some linger. Group dynamics are complex. We don't understand how wolf packs and caribou herds work, so why do some think that they can manufacture a cohesive "team" by forcing people to spend time together when they have better things to do.

Sadly, five minute's worth of analysis is more time than you should need to see the utter stupidity of even attempting to do this. First, the reporter who wrote about the successful company with happy employees did not include the stories from the ten other companies he researched that were going bankrupt, despite having the happiest workforce since the twelve apostles. Nobody wants to read about that, and the reporter knows it so he left that part out. Second, since it was in the business press, it was probably a plant by the marketing department anyway. It's not real news just because it appears in print, you know. Third, when a reporter shows up a cubicle, do you think the employee tells the reporter the truth; he's not a priest, he's a reporter, and the employees are not all Catholic anyway.

A more odious form is when the "team building" is just a paternalistic cynical confidence game. I used to work in IT and in its early days, working in the field was cult-like. If you were weird, then you were smart and you were special, so went the thinking. Management allowed you to dress like a slob. You could eat Cheesies at your desk, and people egotistically thought that they were permitted these liberties because they were important. What utter nonsense, what self-delusion. Management let people behave that way because those smelly slobs were working 100 hours per week while only being paid for 40. If it made them feel good to think that they were on a mission, well, so much the better.

Eventually, that morphed into companies that had snooker tables or foozball machines so the staff could relax at work. This was often touted as a way to integrate your working life with you personal life. Oh sure, no better way to spend an evening than to play foozball with the same people you just spent 12 hours working with so that you can go back to work again after the last goal is scored. Taking time off work to play foozball with colleagues so that you could stay even later and work longer hours with no overtime, THAT is the very definition of being a stupid sap. When the VP of Marketing signed contracts that were impossible to deliver without the programming staff having to work weekends and for which he received a healthy commission only because that programming staff wasn't being paid for those weekends, well, it doesn't take an MBA to figure out who was being screwed. The foozball machine was the corporate equivalent of vaseline; it made the mounting easier to endure. Please be gentle.

I saw a quote once from some arrogant silicone valley CEO who said something like, "Commitment starts at 80 hours per week." It's not difficult to see the benefit to him if all his employees believe that.

In the 1970s film North Dallas Forty, the actor Nick Nolte played an aging professional football player whose time with the "team" was coming to an end. The story was about his coming to terms with that. In a scene near the end of the movie, he was in a conversation with his coach in a large boardroom and the team owners were in a far-away corner, out of earshot. I can't remember the exact words, but the coach said something about doing it for the team (probably quitting), to which Nolte answered, "The TEAM?!? We're not the team, we're the equipment, THEY're the team", as he looked toward the owners. Perceptive dialogue for a Hollywood movie, I thought.

The sad thing is that when a group of people gel into a cohesive team, it can be very rewarding and sometimes even thrilling. I have experienced this a couple of times, when the accomplishments of a group were greater than what could have been achieved by any of the individuals, and it was a real treat to be part of it. The best thing that management can do in a situation like that is to stay out of the way, interference can only foul things up. Knowing when not to interfere does not require management expertise, an MBA won't help, neither will a good suit or a booming voice, it requires the maturity of an intelligent adult. That must be why it's a rare talent.