Real Team Building

If you're sick and tired of popsicle stick exercises and marshmallow exercises to build a team, this story is for you.

Actually takes place about 30 years ago, I was working for a company called Arthur Andersen, which is now called Accenture. I was in management consulting, and I was doing a project with Chanel in their retail boutiques. Now, the project was going well, we were selecting some new software for their retail stores. And we were on time, on budget, the project was going fine, not great. Not jumping up and down.

But it was going fine. And at the time, someone on my team, who's much more social than I am, said, Hey, why don't we take the client out for dinner?

We were working very hard. Let's take him out for dinner. So great. So I went to Jessica, who was my co-lead on the Chanel side of the project. And I said, hey, we'd love to take you out on Thursday night. So we went out for dinner, had some great conversation, ended up going to two or three, or I don't know how many bars after the dinner. And we had an amazing time between us on the Arthur Andersen side and the client.

So I kind of rolled back in that morning, not feeling exactly well, but well enough to go to work. And I rolled back in, and I see Jessica, my co-lead on the project from the Chanel side, and she looked at me, and she said that was fun last night, almost as if she was totally surprised to have fun with us.

She said that was fun last night. I said, Oh really? And she said yeah, I didn't realize you guys had personalities, which was the biggest backhanded compliment I probably had ever gotten.

See back then at Arthur Andersen, we were known we were kind of stereotyped as being Arthur androids is actually what they called us. Because, like robots, we just kind of went in, got the job done and left. And we weren't exactly known for being fun and having personalities. Well, we had a great time with the team that night. And from then on, it was almost as if the brick wall between consultant and client came down. And the project went amazing.

We built great relationships, we did great work together. And 10, 20, 25 years later, I was still doing work in different forms with Jessica and with Chanel. So sometimes, all it takes to build a great team is not a popsicle stick exercise or trustful.

Sometimes it's about just getting to know each other better. It doesn't mean you have to go out and drink one too many and be hungover the next day. It doesn't have anything to do with that. It's just finding ways to break down that brick wall and get to know each other.

It could be as simple as going out to lunch together or dinner together or doing some fun event.

One of the things I do with my clients is something called a personal lifeline exercises where everybody shares throughout their life from birth to today. What are the major highlights and lowlights of their lives the things that have gone great personally and professionally, and some of the more difficult times in your life. And just by taking about 10 minutes each and sharing those highs and lows. We get to know each other at a level we never did before.

People that have been working together for 20 years, do that exercise and get to know each other at a level that they never have before. It also might be as simple as something I do at the beginning of every meeting is to have my clients go through good news. Good news on the business side, certainly. But more importantly for this is good news on the personal side. You know, people talk about taking their daughter to go visit colleges or visiting their mom or getting together with friends or about a great vacation they went on or are going on. And again, even for teams that have been working together for 20 years, when they go through personal good news, they get to know each other at a whole other level. Now, that's not just fluff. That's not just we're trying to make everybody happy on a team.

If you are more of a team if you know each other at a deeper, more deeper, more personal level. If you knock down those brick walls, you're going to be more creative, you're going to be more productive. You're going to be more energized to be part of that team.