“Teambuilding” is not a “band-aid”- Part I

What comes to mind when you hear: “We are going to have a teambuilding!”?

• Esmeralda, Jaime and Luis do not speak to Pablo (supervisor).
• Sofía insulted Mario in the middle of a project meeting. Now no one speaks to anyone else.
• Osvaldo complains that no one cleans up the kitchen after lunch and he claims lack of team spirit.
• Everyone does as she pleases in the sales department; there is no team spirit. At the end of the workday, they all go separate ways and do not socialize together.
• Many businesses decide to have a teambuilding when confronting situations such as those mentioned above.

However, a teambuilding is not a band-aid… it is an intervention to facilitate interactions and promote cohesion within a team including aspects such as trust, communication, and integration among its members.
Having a teambuilding before carefully analyzing what is going on in the Company could be premature at best.

• So, next time when someone talks about having a teambuilding, stop and seek the underlying symptom.

Here are some questions to get you started:

• What do we want to accomplish with the teambuilding?
• What is going on? Is it circumstantial, incidental, or recurring?
• How do we want to accomplish it?
• What has to change?

​Remember: if you do not understand the reasons behind those behaviors that you are observing, you will not be able to address them.
We will present the different types of teambuilding and how to select the one that will help you to obtain the best results in Part II of this article so that the teambuilding does not become a band-aid.
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For additional information, please visit our Facebook page, The Human Factor Consulting Group Inc. and learn more of our books at www.td.org/noise  and  www.td.org/torch