The Leader As Team Building Expert
Is the Leader required to organize team-building events?
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
A question was asked to me during a process of reviewing and splitting my scope between two other new managers. While chatting with one of them, he said: “That’s right! You do a lot of events with the team. I am required to do as well?”. Clearly, this was a plea for approval to ease the recent track record of initiatives with the team. In the context of this article, I will go through whether the leader should be the main driver for team-building events. The answer, in my opinion, it kinda is.
Not long ago I was managing a brand new project which was a carbon copy of another one. The technologies were the same, the project’s budget was bigger on the project I was managing but not that much, and the required skills and profiles were the same between teams. The only difference was the project’s scope inside the organization. The feedback I got over and over again, was that my team was the “coolest” team. Even though I was not actively working for being the coolest kid on the block. My main focus was on results, which were a struggle to achieve in a highly politicized company but we were getting there. The team working environment was awesome, some of the team members reported the project was one of the best places they ever worked. So what was the secret sauce?
Age average is a big part of it. The older a team member gets, their priorities shift towards home responsibilities (kids, wife\husband, life routines, etc.). As a consequence, the higher the team’s average age is, the less informal people tend to be with one another in the context of a project. The other part of the secret sauce is simply to organize the team’s lunches, dinners, beers, and general events, across the year’s calendar. With higher age-average teams, the leader needs to be very selective in these events to maximize value. This does a great deal of destroying barriers to communication and ease people with one another.
One big change that happened with the team’s beer night out, was when I traveled to Paris with my top 4 senior engineers to meet some colleagues from the French branch. We eventually met the manager responsible for Production Support who was known (literally across continents) to reply to queries in a rude and unhelpful manner. I got feedback that he had situations where he was on the verge of calling the requesters “stupid” and not being shy to display these events for everyone to see. One night, we went to a nearby bar with some key project staff and this individual came as well. After some beers and decent conversation we got to know each other struggles with the project we were all working on. However, the biggest achievement was that everything changed after that soirée. The relationship between this particular individual and all my 4 senior engineers had changed from night to day. The communication between the two parties showed a massive improvement, and the level of overall respect for each other’s work as well.
Going back to this article question: Is the Leader required to organize team-building events? My opinion depends greatly on the project’s duration and main goals. If it’s a small project (< 1 year), the leader might go away without organizing any team event. However, the more complex and long the project is, the more the project is to gain, and the more interpersonal communication improves with these events.
This is one of the biggest challenges while managing projects overseas or with people fully remote. There is little room to express informally the project’s challenges and to informally have a conversation about topics that may impact personal or team performance. Scrum or other Agile frameworks are strong in managing feedback. Formal feedback. However, there is immense value in providing informal feedback to peers and unfiltered direct access to project decision-makers and key engineers. There is yet an Agile ceremony to be invented which can provide the same level of value that the one found on a laser tag event.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur
Helpful tips for team-building, Arthur! 💯
That's to say: Our teams pivot our projects. And understanding who our teams are, their motivations (just like you identified your team's drive - being their age) would help us make better provisions for them.
...which in turn leads to a higher productivity in value because they are happy! 😊
Some company micromanages. 😅 And some Managers don't care: "because you're paid."
Happy to see that you are driving a change!
The metaphor of the "leader as a team building expert" is extremely useful and insightful. After all, teams are the unit of productivity in software/product development!
Your point about "building bridges" is spot on, and the insight that older team mates (parents, for example) tend to be more focused, and "do the work and get out" types is also insightful.
In my experience, there's another aspect to team building that leaders need to be aware of, I call this the OTOG principle (One-Team-One-Goal).
I'd be interested in your thoughts on these 2 aspects of building a team: https://vascoduarte.substack.com/p/the-key-to-successful-engineering?r=3a1rs5