Learning - The Only Sustainable Form Of Team Spirit
The warm buzz of so-called team spirit doesn’t last and it doesn’t make teams stronger
If you’ve been following these blogs, you know that I have a list of popular team building ideas that don’t do anything to improve team effectiveness. Near the top of my list is a focus on team spirit, or what I call “teaminess.”
What is Team Spirit anyway?
To start let’s answer the question, “What is team spirit, anyway?” There’s no fixed definition. I once conducted an informal survey of a few Mars Associates and what I came up with is that team spirit is that fleeting buzz you get from being with and doing enjoyable things with others.
Think about the last team building exercise you participated in (one that you didn’t find ridiculous, please). You and your colleagues laughed together and maybe enjoyed a feeling of accomplishment depending on what you were doing. Maybe it was a ropes course or building a complex Lego structure. Whatever it may have been, if it went well you got that team spirit buzz. But, does that buzz, that warm “teamy” feeling of togetherness lead to better collaboration? Rarely, if ever. Is it an indication of a healthier team? No? We can have a few laughs together, enjoy each other’s company at an offsite without being more productive than other similar teams who don’t do those things.
There is a different kind of team spirit, one with clear and lasting value that I experienced early in my working life. I began my professional career in the stock photography business. This was before the days of the internet when commercial stock photography, generic photos intended for advertising and promotional uses, was in its infancy. We were a small group working in a new, rapidly growing industry and seeing double-digit growth year after year for several years. We had a great leader who had a vision not only for our business but for our industry in general.
Those of us on the front lines, speaking with clients, fulfilling orders and closing sales day in and day out were figuring things out as we went. Through strong leadership and having to cope with a super-hectic pace and demanding customers, we learned how to work together. Sometimes we failed and learned how to move forward as a unit despite the reversals. Most importantly, we learned how to learn together and we loved it. I was earning terrible money at the time so I took a second job painting apartments on evenings and weekends just so I could afford to keep my crazy, wonderful day job.
Later in my career I moved on to larger companies where fancy, well-catered offsites and conventional team building exercises were de rigueur. Those exercises were fun sometimes, but more often embarrassing and/or annoying. They never instilled in me the energy or commitment I’d felt back in my stock photo days.
What really builds Team Spirit? Working hard and LEARNING TOGETHER
I was beginning to understand that you don’t build great teams from goofy exercises or rah-rah pep rallies in the main lobby. What builds great teams and strong, sustainable team spirit is working hard and learning together.
In my podcast series, LESSONS FROM MARS, I detail the framework we developed at Mars: The Six Practices of High Performance Collaboration. They provide teams with a roadmap to collaborative success. They also serve as a diagnostic, a way to understand, with specificity what’s working and what’s not, what a team needs to learn. In fact, two of the six practices, Clarify Context and Sustain & Renew, focus exclusively on learning and adapting. That’s how important learning is to excellent collaboration.
If you want a more effective team that feels great to be a part of forget all that hokey team building stuff. At its best - and in my experience it’s rarely at its best – typical team building can be fun. If nothing else it offers a break from the same-old, same-old back at the office or factory. But fostering teaminess, that shallow, short-lived version of team spirit, will not make your team better. If you want a stronger team work together on things that matter. Rally around shared challenges, collaborating to overcome them. Pause occasionally to examine what you’re doing so you can learn and keep growing together. It will produce a team spirit that has legs, that benefits not just the team, but everyone on it and the organization and customers the team serves. That’s a team spirit worth striving for and celebrating.
