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I don't think it's so cut and dried as "you have a team or you don't." Marriages aren't like that, friendships aren't like that---team cohesion falls on a spec

I don't think it's so cut and dried as "you have a team or you don't." Marriages aren't like that, friendships aren't like that---team cohesion falls on a spectrum as well. I think there's value to team-building exercises when the participants want to be on the team, because just wanting isn't enough. But I agree that those sorts of exercises are certainly not sufficient alone.

stiff 15y ago
"you have a team or you don't" should be read in the context of the sentence it appeared in - I do agree there is a spectrum, the point was that you cannot somehow make a team from a bunch of people if they don't go along with each other well by themselves. Those "team building" activities have a very artificial feeling to them and while many management people gladly will jump on any currently popular management bandwagon, I think most participants just think it's ridiculous, even through no-one will say it out loud. The actual team building happens when people do their real work together and there are sensible ways to encourage this, there was recently this post roughly about how Pixar or Apple offices are arranged in a way that you have to go across the whole office to grab a tea, so that people run into each other many times a day and have a chance to discuss stuff.