Unpopular Opinion: Your Team Building Is Kinda Crap
I’ve got an unpopular opinion — museums and non-profits need to stop buying into the idea of third-party facilitated team-building. Hear me out.
A Cure For All That Ails You
This straight-up corporate snake oil is selling a band-aid solution to a systematic problem in the museum-world.
While there is often a huge rift between on-the-floor employees and leadership, spending a few hours pulling metaphors from guacamole-making competitions isn’t going to make the long-lasting change you’re looking for.
From outrageous competitions to the tried and true trust-falls, third-party companies that create a stressful environment to build bonds between co-workers end up facilitating artificial experiences that at best are HR photo-op candy.
Your Actual Problem
In the museum world, the rift between front of house staff to upper management can’t be cured with a day of forced fun. Well-intentioned by leadership, this solution doesn’t lend itself to curing what actually ails these institutions. And while I do buy into that some of these exercises open up new lines of communication, or facilitate common experiences between groups that may not mingle — it isn’t the solution for your problem.
Building actual trust in your team comes from a culture change — putting your actions and money where your mouth is. Museums function off mission statements, which generically almost always fall into this format:
The mission of [museum] is to preserve, collect, and educate visitors about the [museum subject].
Fill in any words in those blanks and you still have an identity crisis at your museum. A crisis that one-off team-building experiences aren’t going to fix. Institutions need to prioritize looking inward and seeing if in their strategic plan covers unabashedly knowing who they are, how they function, and how that translates to employee expectations. Museums already struggle with portraying personality outwardly, so it stands to reason that internally it’s also going to be a battle. It’s like what the great philosopher RuPaul always says, “if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
Looking Inward
Logically we know relationships are built on trust, and trust takes time. What trendy team building leaves out is the idea that sure your team has to trust not only each other but the other player in this relationship is the institution itself. Teams, employees, and personnel come and go, but the policies and culture you build last longer than even the most dedicated workers.
What these experiences are advertising selling you are real things to create your inward identity; aligning around goals, building effective working relationships, reducing team members’ role ambiguity, and finding creative solutions. But for museums and non-profits in particular, booking a one-time experience to solve these problems isn’t going to cut it in the same way as investing in building systematic change. And the allure of these third-party experiences makes sense because the alternative of introspection is hard!
As Carlos Vales-Dapena puts it in his article Stop Wasting Your Money on Team Building:
“Strong relationships and trust do matter to collaboration, but they are not the starting point. They are the outcomes of dedicated people striving together.”
So think twice before booking that pricey custom experience, and think about investing in defining who you want to be and how you want to get there.
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This article first appeared on jskennedy.net on 7/20/2019.
