Turning to oneself – the trial of team-building

After a corporate training a few days ago, my colleagues and I went to visit the general manager of the company. Before the training, he always felt that the employees were not motivated enough, the problem-solving skills were insufficient, the teamwork was not good, and the cross-department interaction problems were constant, and he even bluntly said that "the general manager is doing the things of the department heads, and the department heads are doing the things of the employees".

The purpose of team building

In response to the above-mentioned enterprise needs, we provide a customized team building training, and such a scenario often occurs in my more than 10 years of experiential training, and the purpose of team building training organized by enterprise organizations is divided into seven categories:

• Increase team cohesion or trust
• Shape team consensus
• Resolve intra- or cross-departmental conflicts
• Annual Strategy Consensus Camp
• Team building in response to organizational adjustment or consolidation
• Enterprise newcomer training/reserve cadre training
• Special needs (e.g., new supervisors, organizational change, seeking buy-in to the organization's new goals or tasks, etc.)

However, from the perspective of demand alone, it can be simplified into two categories:

• Growth model: The current situation of the team seems to be good, but it wants to be better to meet the challenges of the future.
• Problem Pattern: The team is facing a challenge that needs to be addressed urgently.

In my experience, more than 90% of the above two models are "problem patterns", especially in recent years, the overall economic environment has changed drastically and the market has become more and more challenging, resulting in more frequent changes in the enterprise organization (e.g. launching new strategies, conceiving new goals, entering new markets, proposing new products, etc.), all of which test the internal interaction of the whole enterprise.

The necessity of team building

From the team building training in the "problem mode", we can find that more than half of the training centers on the team "leader". According to a large-scale survey conducted by Gallup, nearly 75 percent of employees leave because they want to leave their supervisor, not the company, and among the 200 employees who leave a multinational company, the majority of the reasons for leaving are "annoying supervisors." This kind of survey data is very much in line with my observation in the past when I conducted team building training, in other words, if it can effectively help managers improve their leadership and management skills, more than half of the team building problems are solved.

Generally speaking, the promotion path of a corporate executive is often due to personal performance or professional performance that meets the company's expectations, so the career is on the rise. However, it can be found that although professional and performance performance can be improved through experience accumulation and personal efforts, leadership or management skills are difficult to effectively quantify and evaluate, that is, it is difficult to execute and demonstrate, so we found out why the leadership and management-related books on the market have been selling well for many years.

But does reading books improve leadership? Actually, the reason is that the leadership situations in the books are not exactly the same as the team situations that the supervisor encounters, which is why the methods that seem to work in the books are difficult to implement in the work. So, how do you solve this problem?

Crossing the first test of team building - looking for yourself

There are many courses to improve the leadership and management skills of supervisors, but no matter what type of training they are, the first problem in their training is the self-awareness of supervisors. Over the past few years, it has been found that when there is a problem with team interaction or performance, department heads often think that team members are not proactive, think positively, or even work hard enough. But ask each other, why do employees have such a situation? Maybe sometimes it is really related to the employees themselves, or the system, but according to my years of experience, most of them have absolutely something to do with the leadership style of the supervisor!

As mentioned earlier, the general manager gave back to me at the time of the return visit, and after the training, he came back and pondered for a long time, whether the employees would have such a situation, is it because he usually manages too much and is too detailed, causing them to wait for my instructions every day. This is the value of team building training, through the designed situational experience activities, so that the students can be aware and understand the real situation, and then through the profound guiding questions and reflections, the students are aware of the status quo and must change.

"Awareness-Understanding-Change-Action", when going through this process of change, triggering the learner to move towards a better self, followed by the willingness and display of action.

Therefore, the general manager took the initiative to share with us that his leader no longer gave instructions unilaterally, but discussed with the relevant supervisors, and guided the supervisors to propose solutions, and then gave feedback, because he hoped that he would not be as tired as in the past, and his supervisors and employees could also find a sense of accomplishment in their work. When he began to change, the team atmosphere began to slowly follow.

Why do we say that the first test of team building training is to "seek for oneself"? Mencius mentioned in the first part of Lilou: "Love is not kissing, but benevolence, governing others is not curing, but wisdom, courtesy is not answering, but respecting—those who do not do what they can't do are all looking for themselves, and their bodies are righteous and the world is returning to them." In short, when we find that after working hard, the results are still not as expected, then everything must be reversed and think about what are our shortcomings, and only by making ourselves better and better, the team members will be willing to submit.

The second test of cross-team construction training - the training structure that blends rationality and sensibility

Why does a training need to take into account both rationality and emotion? Observing that most supervisor training is still based on skill teaching and improvement, which is very rational. Although the learning objectives and content are very clear in a rational training structure, and even the degree of absorption of the trainees can be judged through assessment, it raises another question: do the participants really think they need such a course? A long-time friend of mine, who is currently serving as the special assistant to the general manager of a listed company, recently vented his bitterness with me, because the president of the company issued a directive, requiring the company's senior executive assistants and secretaries to use seven Saturdays in the next three months to carry out secretarial skills improvement training, covering communication skills, briefing skills, service awareness, etc., and the test will be conducted immediately after each course, which is related to the year-end assessment of the participants. I very much believe that the boss of the company will have such an arrangement, and he must have seen some problems in his daily operation, so he urgently asks the human resources department to organize relevant training as soon as possible. But with such good intentions, we only see the helplessness and even anger of the participants, and they are looking for reasons to avoid training. When the company arranges this kind of training with rational thinking, the participants will probably respond with a very rational attitude: "These contents are very good, but they don't meet my needs, and I still have a lot of meetings to do, so I can't attend..."

In fact, experiential courses such as team building, according to group dynamics research, can indeed improve the interaction of participants in a short period of time, which is why in some indoor and outdoor experiential activities, we can see students hugging each other and crying, or are willing to hold hands to pass the challenge together! When everyone is arguing about who is going to do the work in the gray area in the meeting, can we ask everyone to hug each other first? Therefore, when there is a dispute between supervisors or departments, the boss goes to the human resources department and hopes to have another team building training, hoping to make a difference. As a result, it is held every year, or even every quarter, and the activities that have been played can no longer be played, so the challenge of the activities is getting higher and more difficult, just like eating morphine, it seems to be addictive!

From this point of view, it is best to be able to take into account both perceptual and rational training, perceptual training focuses on the thinking and attitude of the participants, and rational training focuses on the growth of the participants' skills and knowledge. In general corporate training, almost all trainees are required to participate, and it is difficult for them to participate wholeheartedly without first changing their mindset. Through perceptual experiential activities, students can first perceive, and when their intentions and focus have changed, they can then use practical skills and knowledge transfer, and even through exercises, so that students can learn and apply them immediately. From the design of Kang Shi Teng's "Tempering Thinking and Doing Outdoor Leadership Training Open Class - Zhongheng Crossing", it can be found that through high-intensity hiking challenges, students can perceive their truest selves, and even strengthen their attitude of change through the most sincere feedback among students, and then appropriately teach leadership skills and principles during the period, which can be transformed into immediate action and execution, which makes students feel that they have benefited a lot.

The important thing is whether the leader of the team can observe the most real state of the team from the training process, and use this to impact the leader's original thinking, and then gradually form a positive attitude of "seeking for oneself", and influence the whole team and lead the team to a better place through changing and improving themselves. Therefore, the growth of supervisor leadership should not be external to the team, but grow with the team, and team building training is no longer just about embracing, shouting, and challenging high goals, but through appropriate skills into real leadership behaviors, so that leaders can gradually create a high-performance team that partners are willing to go all out in the real workplace!

About the Author:

Yang Gongmao, expert in the implementation of team building culture / senior consultant of Kang Shiteng

In recent years, he has frequently traveled back and forth between the two sides of the strait to assist the team in establishing leadership-related training for enterprises and government agencies, and is a well-known experiential training expert on both sides of the strait.