Building a solid team requires mastery of all the HR disciplines: reward policy, organisational culture, management processes, and working practices, to name but a few. It’s what makes effective team-building one of the greatest challenges out there. Rob Lewis looks at what HR can – and can’t – do.
As the mastermind behind D-Day once said, it is better to have one person working with you than three people working for you.
Facilitating solid team work is probably the single most effective thing you can do to maximise the return on your human capital. But if, like Dwight Eisenhower, you want to see some camaraderie amongst the troops, your HR department needs to stick to its borders.
“It’s about how you design your organisation, particularly in terms of structures and processes,” says Angela Baron, an adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). “There should be a HR contribution in that, although that will roughly be the extent of its influence.”
Performance management, for example, is a powerful tool for line managers when it comes to handling their staff. It’s not an area where HR can be actively involved. HR can, however, contribute to the design of that tool, so that line managers will be promoting (or at least not detracting) from team values in their jobs.
Source: CIPD
Flying the teamwork flag
While you might be tempted to take a more hands-on approach, you can accomplish plenty on the strategic level. After all, if you want healthy team relationships, the state of your organisation’s culture and values are crucially important.
One key factor is ensuring that people don’t feel they will be blamed for their mistakes: scape-goating can be a real barrier. Without mutual respect and trust, a team cannot exist. And while HR can’t tell line managers how to do their job, these are precisely the things it should be promoting.
“It’s in the remit of HR to foster and encourage,” Baron explains. “You want a workplace where people can flourish and grow.”
To this end, HR could lead an organisation-wide audit to establish what kind of culture is in place and areas where incorrect values are fostered. Such surveys can throw up surprising results and a series of conflicting messages – incentivisation is just one area where companies often practice quite the reverse of what they preach.
If you want to encourage team working, rewarding on grounds of individual performance (as is common practice) sends out the wrong signal. That might be an obvious example, but there are more subtle ways in which teamwork is hampered. For instance, it’s all very well having a flexible working policy in place but if employees know very well their organisation’s culture means ‘no promotion unless you’re in at nine’ it rather defeats the point.
“It’s not enough to do a bit of tinkering around the edges,” as Baron puts it. “It’s not just about having policies there, it’s also about having the climate in which people can take them up. Having an anti-bullying policy doesn’t mean you’re not going to have bullying if you don’t back it up with some pretty clear behaviour guidelines.”
This is an area where your department can really contribute. The days of administrative HR are over now and much of its modern daily existence stems from helping the line manager – and lest we forget, good teams are really only as good as their team leaders.
If you are looking for inventive ways to help them capitalise on your organisation’s most precious asset, try not to impede their working day and be especially careful where the traditional team building event is concerned.
Outsourcing your teambuilding
Angela Baron, adviser, CIPD
Baron admits that if strong team relations are an issue, team building events can be very important. However, there can also be difficulties if you try to do it yourself.
“The problem is that participants worry that there’s a hidden agenda,” says Felix Delmar, who runs Wild Events, a team building business in East Anglia. “Some suspect they might even be being assessed. If you bring in somebody from the outside, the slate is clean.
“An outside facilitator can ask questions – and they might be the dumbest, most obvious questions – but it’s amazing how much people will be prepared to share.”
Occasionally, the personal history some employees have with line mangers and even with members of the HR department mean that the team-building value of internally organised events can be severely limited. HR can still script much of the itinerary for such events but they’re better off taking a back seat when it comes to the big day.
“If a colleague is running the team-building session, you’re likely to end up doing what you’ve always done,” says Delmar. “You’ll act in the same way because you’re used to that person and you know how to respond to that person. If you want to get something different then you’ve got to do something different.”
Team-building events don’t have to be based around assault courses or rain-swept hillsides, of course. They don’t even have to be outdoors. But remember, if you’re going to book one, do make sure it’s followed up.
“When people come back into the organisation they need to be able to apply what they’ve learnt,” Baron says. “It’s no good sending everyone to a team building event and expecting them to come back and for it all to happen by magic.”
2 Responses
Team Building
Good stuff this Rob, and Jeremy, and I wish to contribute this thought as a “follow-on” from Rob’s comment that “…..good teams are only as good as their team leaders”. To me, good teams are only as good as their team leaders leaders. So often I have managers [team leaders]on seminars we run, where the comment comes across consistently “My boss should be here with me.”
So my contribution is aimed at providing backup to what has been said about getting the culture right. Without the culture, and without all team leaders/managers in the organisation having to sing along to the same tune, individual team leaders are presented with more than a challenge….more like a
bl%^&y great hurdle to cross. Therefore, the team leaders whom I most admire, quietly so as to not upset their leaders, are those who succeed at team leading when nobody else in the place is doing it right. If only we could package up their tenacity and determination, to inoculate senior managers????????
New Team Building
Whether from HR or not, something I have learned the hard way across several continents is that really effective ‘team building’ rarely happens successfully all on its own.
We might like to expect it to, and why shouldn’t it! But this is such a profound activity, I can only say it doesn’t very often.
Great team building requires clarification and agreement of many ‘overt’ matters, such as shared objectives, a shared vision of what success may look like, even some common experiences for preference and certainly agreed rules for engagement.
But there may well be many more subterranean ‘covert’ matters too that often may only surface long afterwards, that could so easily have been put right with careful, empathetic and wise facilitation at the start.
For example: who may be the mandated leader and how chosen? Are there any suspected ‘hidden agendas’ that can be either removed or admitted? Where do team member’s individual strengths really lie (and what areas of ‘less interest’ may there be that could be shielded by others?). Are the team’s underlying values each understood and coherent? What rewards from success may each be expecting – and what might be the cost of failure? How much commitment might each team member be prepared to offer, and are there any agreed processes to deal with internal disagreement? Does the team feel it has the requisite tools and resources – does it even really agree with the timescales suggested? And how can they learn to trust in each other long before any challenges become mzission critical?
I think it was General Custer who said “Time spent on reconnaisance is never wasted” – and what a wise thought that is! Time invested at the start of any project in all of these areas is never wasted.
And although this may seem a plea from a self-interested, external team facilitator – many teams do indeed often need such a person as an independent honest broker and catalyst, whether internally opr externally, to avoid wasted time and even broken spirits.
Kind regards
Jeremy