Team Building: Cultivating Your Greatest Asset
I've said it many times before, but people make or break any company. My "foxhole" post highlighted that teams grow in importance during the tough times. However, team cohesion doesn't just happen, it takes work.When I first left college as an engineer, I'll admit, team building exercises at IBM seemed hokey and hardly worth the effort. As I grew into management roles and then moved into venture capital, the value of team building became more obvious. As a VC I've had the pleasure of witnessing over 40 different entrepreneurs and senior managers build teams and I can honestly say the most productive teams, after exceeding 10 people, came from concerted senior management attention to build familiarity, values, vision and passion among teammates.
What have you done this year to build team cohesion, and, in particular, what have you done since October, when the economy injected fear and uncertainty into your team? Likewise, as an employee or manager, in small companies and large, what are the best and worst team building activities you've ever seen?
Labels: team building, teamwork
Posted by VC Dan | 11/16/2008
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Comments (9)
I think that building a team is more important now than ever. Paul Graham wrote in his March 05 essay "How to start a startup" in regards to building teams
- Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.
I definitely look for animals in the beginning - but they had better be the alpha dog as well as a pack leader when the time comes. Bonding with the rest of the pride is just as important as being top lion.
Great post Dan.
Hi Dan,
Now team building is becoming more difficult than ever might be because of the current problems. I know a guy called Mark collard who writes book about team building games called "No Props" I am eagerly waiting for his new book called 'Count
Me In: Large Group Activities That Work' does any one knows when he is publishing it.
http://www.inspireyourgroup.com
www.inspireyourgroup.com/noprops.htm
wow, that's a lotta metaphors in one comment...for teams under 10, I agree, it's all about the studs that eat/sleep the business.
As your organization grows, you need a combination of position players, cleanup hitters and managers. They all need significant commitment and passion for the company, but they can't all lead. Some of the best team building exercises help everyone appreciate the strengths, weaknesses and roles most comfortable to each other.
@anonymous: never heard of it Mark, but thanks for the resource.
Good post Dan. I was always told investors invest in the track, the rider then the pony...(Market,entrepreneur and then product)
I believe a good entrepreneur's passion shines through and they have the ability to get others excited and focused in good times or bad. I feel Ted is great at that. He is very focused, yet still can maintain a light hearted, fun and productive culture/work environment. In regards to team work...With all the social media/collaboration tools out there do you think it's possible for a large company or group to have strong team unity & productivity even if all the team members are physically apart? If so how? Any insights on virtual team building concepts or ideas?
@david: virtual teambuilding, that's a good question. I do believe that online tools make virtual teams more productive than ever, but I'm a strong advocate for single geography teams, whenever possible.
There are exceptions. For example, MyBlogLog had founders in FL, MA and CA. That worked for their type of company, but they were still small when YHOO acquired them. If they grew to 50-100 employees, the strains of geography would have shown.
If you have to operate with a virtual team, I'd recommend overkill on interaction; including videoconferencing/skype when possible. Although I don't have success datapoints yet, I'd bet group twitter services like yammer.com and twinger.com will play a big role for virtual teams -- allowing the online equivalent of office chatter.
As for virtual team building exercises, I'd start with online gaming options; particularly games that have a strategy component. I'd also bet some virtual scavenger hunts could be designed for teams to find items online or offline via qik video. That would be fun, but I'm not sure you would get the strategy/leadership benefits of good in-person team building.
I hope these ideas help. Any ideas from others for online team building?
Good thoughts Dan. I agree that from a company stand point having a team in one geographic location is better overall. There's more accountability when people are in one location and accessible. I also feel like there's more chances for spontaneous innovation.
I do think virtual teams are good and if everyone adopts/uses the collaboration tool it actually makes the group more productive when in person. Everyone for instance could be caught up to speed on different departments in their company and when it was time to discuss actionable tasks collectively, each would have a deeper understanding or reference point and be able to contribute better insight.
I think the virtual scavenger hunt would be cool. I also think a cool idea would be having each team member add a sentence to a story on a blog. Instead of text it would be more real and humanized if it were a video or audio file.
Just my $.02's...Have a good thanksgiving!
Just a note to thank you for sharing the cartoon with your readers - it's one of my favorites, and I'm delighted you liked it!
@rob: thanks for stopping by and great cartoon!
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