Building Real Project Teams v. Phony Team-Building Exercises

How do you create an amazingly creative and productive project team? One strategy used by many businesses is as follows:

1. Collect a random group of employees. Declare them to be a team.

2. Pay a consulting firm a jillion dollars to take the team through a series of team-building exercises, such as making people take turns falling backwards into the arms of their teammates or taking the team whitewater rafting, skydiving or rock climbing.

3. Wonder why project teams are not successful. Call new consultants for additional team-building exercises.

I suggest an alternative: select teams carefully and on purpose. By selecting people with complementary skill sets and personality traits, you create a team that has the essential ingredients for success: initiative, leadership, vision, focus, attention to detail, folllow-through, etc. If consultants are used, use them to help assess employee talents and build teams based on those talents. Such teams will not need to go rock climbing in order to work together. They will simply work, each according to his/her gifts, to accomplish a given project.

The most productive people in a firm would rather be working on projects than going on retreats. The most intelligent people in a firm will be insulted by the silly pop psychology at a team-building retreat. Simplify your life by just picking talented people, giving them a job to do, and letting them do it! Do the work at the front end, when teams are created, instead of trying to fix teams that were poorly built from the beginning.

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman is a delight to read. If you have ever been the victim of management consultants and their silliness, you will find this book a refreshing change. Rather than untested theories, Buckingham and Coffman pored over two huge studies by the Gallup Organization in which successful managers were found to behave contrary to prevailing wisdom. We can learn a lot by studying success rather than failure.

Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk by Dr. Ben Carson and Gregg Lewis is not specifically about business, but is the best general treatment of risk management I have ever read. Dr. Carson, a neurosurgeon, knows better than anyone that there is no such thing as a risk-free life; he teaches us to accept that fact and offers his simple decision-making model for determining which risks are worth taking. Every project manager needs to read this book.