Partner Article

"Team building is so passe"...or is it?

Jim Lusty, partner at Upping Your Elvis, gives his views and advice on team building.

Despite all the badly managed ‘team building’ exercises I was sent on in the 1990’s and the motivating sports film montages I’ve sat through at sales conferences, one thing that still really plugs into my passions and fires my engine, is seeing or working in a high-performing team. As a sports enthusiast there’s nothing better than seeing a team rise from the ashes to conquer all before them, and I’ve been lucky enough to work in and lead a team in the past that was an unstoppable force for good. It smashed its targets, made light of the recession, constantly delivered world class work and created life-long friends.

At Upping Your Elvis, we believe that the same guiding principles that nurture a creative culture are the very same that bond a team together. After all, when you really stop and think about it they’re both team sports.

Here are six guiding principles that I hope you find useful;

1.Attitude is everything. Indeed a little-known man called Churchill once said “Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.” Attitude is based on belief, your beliefs drive behaviour and behaviour is everything.

I’ve always been an advocate of recruiting on attitude over and above everything else. If a potential recruit is up for a challenge and passionate about the subject, then the skill set required is the easy bit to sort. In the past, I’ve massively underestimated the positive impact of weeding out people who do not fit attitudinally.

In fact, it reinforces to everyone else what we stand for as a team and keeps standards high. Pruning a team keeps it fresh and dynamic, as my parents will testify. Pruning their fruit orchard every year ensures the Lusty household is never short of plums and cooking apples!

Attitudes are formed from many layered experiences over time but how you explicitly engineer positive experiences to create the right attitudes are numerous (and will be highlighted further on in this article).

2.Behaviour. All too often in business we’re not explicit about behaviour. It’s just something that happens around us at a subconscious level. All high-performing teams I’ve been involved with or read about have been explicit about the standards they hold themselves accountable to.

Curt Carlson, CEO of the Stanford Research Institute talked about “acceptable and unacceptable behaviours” in fostering a creative culture and he hired and fired on that basis.

We believe that you shouldn’t leave things to chance. At the start of every meeting, look at the task ahead of you and ask “what’s needed here and how do we need to be to get it done?” Then write up those behaviours on a flip chart, explain them and get everyone to sign up to them. It takes two minutes and will align everyone, make your job a whole lot easier and mean you have more chance for success.

I ‘liked’ an Instagram photo I received the other day. It was a chalk board that had the following written on it; “Your beliefs don’t make you a better person, your behaviours do.” Make it simple for everyone to know how to be and magic will happen.

3.Creating a bond. A team does not just bond over the work it does. It bonds through all the other human touches that come when a group of people spend time together. You need a structure for some of this and create a culture to encourage the rest.

When we run our week-long mastery courses down in Lyme Regis for 9 people, the experience is intensive. I always love seeing how a relatively disparate group of individuals becomes such a tight-knit team by the end.

Shared positive experiences are the key to unifying a group and developing stronger bonds. Again, don’t leave this to chance. Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project creates a monthly event called ‘Breaking bread together’ which is borne out of the shared enjoyment of food, laughter, play, music and conversation.

Bringing people together reminds everyone of a simple truth - together we are strong - and the event provides an opportunity to come together and make connections beyond work. Whether you take everyone up to the top of Snowdon or you bring the professionals in to run a fun day on creativity, think about how you can engineer team-bonding experiences that feel real and authentic.

4. Leadership. Ghandi is famed for his quote “be the change you want to see.” Any team needs to be led by someone and that person needs to lead by example. Whether they like it or not, leaders are constantly creating ‘permission zones’. How they behave in any situation will naturally create permission for the rest of the team to behave the same way.

Being late for meetings, looking at an iPhone during a conversation, sloppy communications or on the more positive side, taking risks, failing, playing, provoking, being human and showing one’s true self. Leaders need to inspire and make it easy to connect at a human level and, although some have the charisma to carry this off, most need to structure and be smart about how they achieve this, so planning is required.

5. Grow. A high-performing team needs to feel as though it’s growing both as a team and as individuals within it. Just as it’s important to chuck out the bad apples, it’s equally healthy to constantly bring in fresh blood. They shake up comfortable dynamics, stimulate and challenge. You also need to over-invest in developing and training your people to grow - high quality training will pay back tenfold.

The most important ongoing thing for a strong team is to develop a feedback culture where team members constantly demand feedback from their colleagues. They can then start to own their further development and play back their strengths and weaknesses to their boss rather than the other way round.

6. Fun. Don’t let people lose perspective on what life is all about. I am a true believer that a team that has fun, a team in which everyone feels that they can be themselves and not take themselves too seriously is a team that will do better work, will go that extra yard and will support each other. A test for this is to see how a team responds to a crisis.

My principle is to laugh in the face of adversity. People will relax which allows them to become better thinkers and so the problem soon goes away.

In conclusion, I thought I’d see what a search of ‘team building’ would bring back and I was pleasantly surprised to find some apt inspirational quotes Here are a few of my favourites:

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth aka The Sultan of Swat and baseball legend.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” ~Margaret Meade

“Remember upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.” ~Alexander the Great

“Gettin’ good players is easy. Gettin’ ’em to play together is the hard part.” ~Casey Stengel

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Upping Your Elvis .