Team Building Isn’t An Activity

Start typing the phrase “team building…” into any search engine and the auto-populate feature will spring to action with a dozen of different varieties of the phrase “team building activities.” Your search results will yield dozes of millions of webpages offering team building activities, virtual team building activities, offsite team building activities, quick team building activities, and so many more.

But all of these articles, and much of our own thinking, rests on an assumption that was really never tested-and when it finally was it was debunked.

Team building is not an activity.

I know this might be hard to receive. You’ve been to team building activities, afterall. You’ve been made to scale the ropes course or figure out how to lay down beams and cross an imaginary river. You’ve done the trivia games and social hours on Zoom. Those were referred to as team building activities. And yes, they were activities.

But if we’re being honest, they weren’t really that effective at team building. Were they?

The research suggests that the effectiveness of team-building activities is all over the board. What’s effective for one team is ineffective for another. But amidst all the variance and noise is a subtle suggestion in the data: that what matters is how similar to real world work the…