Welcome back to A Great Conversation.  In our last conversation, I explained why having a healthy culture where you work is so important.  If you have a healthy culture (where people are excited to work with each other) you will always, over time, become smarter (better results from working with each other).  If unhealthy cultures are marked by signs of low trust, high levels of blame, hyper-rivalry, sarcasm, and cynicism; then the correct question is pretty easy to identify.  How do you fix those problems?

 

The answer is team building.  And the crowd responds with an audible groan.  I say that because as someone that has enjoyed a successful career in team building, I’ve also had plenty of moments when I was a participant in team building events that I too experienced “groan-worthy” moments.  In a lot of cases what my “groan” came down to, was an over-complication of a very simple concept.  Team building is really just finding a way for people to connect with each other.  That’s it.  

 

It doesn’t require a weekend rafting trip with your team.  It doesn’t require time sequestered in a mountain setting complete with a ropes course adventure.  It just requires time spent in meaningful conversation.  I’m sure that notion comes as a surprise to many of you reading these words.  Let me be clear that there is nothing wrong with any of those big-ticket events.  They serve a purpose.  And that is to make the time together as a team more memorable.  The problem is that typically what happens is the event is memorable, but the conversations not so much.  

 

Team building is at its best when your team talks about, what it needs to talk about, when it needs to talk.  That means making time to talk about ways to strengthen relationships among the team.  Smart groups talk about what they want to do when they are together.  But healthy groups talk about how they want to “be” with each other when they are together.  Healthy teams work hard on identifying their values they believe are important.  And it’s not just the identification of a list of “Our Top 17 Values” either.  It’s taking the time to identify them, and then challenging each other to embody them.  It means it’s safe to hold each other accountable for living up to those values.  The more time you spend creating that type of open honest space, the more likely honest and timely feedback will become the norm.  

 

CEO Richard Plepler of HBO during an interview said that in order to nurture honest conversations you as a leader have to believe “I don’t have to be right at the beginning of a meeting as long as HBO is right at the end of the meeting”.  That is a culture that requires a lot of trust.  Next time let’s talk about what it takes to identify those values and then what it takes to align them with action.