Why Team Building is not Team Coaching

Many have invested a bunch of money and a bunch of time in getting your team together to do team building events. Going out to the beach, having dinners, climbing walls together, all sorts of stuff that different corporates and companies do to try to get people to work together better. 

Here’s the thing, none of that stuff actually increases the performance of the team. For years I’ve been telling people to do different things. I’m going to share with you what you can do to actually increase the performance of your team.

The Challenge

So there’s two things that you’re aiming to achieve with your team when you’re coaching them and I’m talking to you as a leader of a team and wants to get more from them. You can invest time in helping them get along better. It’s good, it helps. And when you walk into the office in the morning and people say hello to you and you feel that vibe, you really feel good about that team. But unfortunately, the research says that people getting along better doesn’t lead to any material impact on work  getting done.

So what do we do? What do we invest in? How do we actually help the team not just get along better, which is nice, but also get their work done. So there’s a difference, right? What we’re aiming to do is work on this right? Work on the connections between people. Which is noble and fine, it’s good. And I would encourage some of that. But look, let me talk about what else I would encourage. 

There has to be a reason why we’re going to get people to get along better. If you just put them in a pub and say, hey, have a drink, they will. But they won’t do it with any purpose. 

Team Building vs. Team Coaching

The difference between team building and team coaching is with team coaching, we actually align the purpose of everything that we do towards a clear outcome that we want that team to get to. A clear set of results, a clear expectation around execution with clients, and a clear set of projects that are going to change the business. Basically what we do is we say our job is not just to deliver what we need to now in the present, but our job is to also build this business to be a better business in the future.

If a team gets that that’s their job, two things happen:

• They have much greater clarity about what their actual task is and they don’t spend time focusing on each other on the inside.   

• They actually spend time delivering on the outside, which increases the results that they deliver. 

Summary

Instead of being worried just about their internal relationships on the teamwork side, they get more focused on their external relationships. So the mistake we make with team building is we focus too much on are people getting along, the internal relationships, at the cost of getting that team and those relationships focused on an external goal. 

And when we get this brilliant marriage between getting the team getting along better and getting the work done, and we balance teamwork and clarity, we get this amazing thing called the multiplier effect. Great teams have the multiplier.

How’s this apply to you?

So here’s the thing to you. Are you the one who invests in the pub lunches and the get together? They’re all good and I would continue them, but let’s do something else. You and me, let’s do something else. Let’s not just do team building, let’s do team coaching. All right? 

Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch 

If you want to talk about how that would work for you, send me a message, reply to the email, and let’s talk soon.