#167: Team building: A Provocation

Good morning friend

My week started with Nonkululeko Britton-Masekela saying these kind words, and it ended with Nomvuyiso Batyi saying this. In the middle of the week, my birthday celebrations continued with my sister paying for a magnificent dinner at Thali. Our plates were ablaze with colour and flavour. A dozen dishes later, I was shocked I’d never been before and will go back soon. I hope that your week was as good.

Last week, I asked you for book recommendations that would expand our worlds. Talk Radio guru, Alastair Teeling-Smith suggested Darrel Bristow-Bovey’s Finding Endurance and Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage.

Please share your reading recommendations here.

/ strategy

This week I was asked, “What is your favourite team-building activity?” The question always surprises me. Imagine asking the coach of a professional sports team the same question.

I expect that her answer would be something like “We practice together, we do drills together, we train together, we figure out how to make each person their best and then we work out how to communicate on the field, we play matches, we review our victories and defeats, we adjust our tactics and practice them again, we hang out to learn about each other, that’s how we build a team”.

Team building is not an event. It’s a process.

Our coach does all of that with her team so that when a player is passed the ball on the field of play, his teammates configure themselves optimally. Commentators will reach for words like magical, but their coach knows it is the product of hours of building her team, day in, day out.

She smiles when the commentator shouts ‘miracle’. She remembers the countless hours explaining and practicing what the team must do when the ball goes to Player X’s left.

To be sure, there’ll be once-off activities in her team-building mix. All teams must have fun. But building a team does not happen in a day. It is a relationship forged over time with intent.

It’s a mistake we often make in business. We say that we manage teams but we’re rarely as intentional as professional coaches are. In many corporations, it is always match day with the occasional Amazing Race thrown in the mix.

Once-off events help (for example San Antonio Spurs’ famed team dinners) but team-building is a day-in, day-out focus to help each person be their best and play to their team mates strengths. It is strategic. It is deliberate. It is consistent.

I have previously shared research about the impact of friendships on creating a great team culture. Almost always some of you will respond, that you don’t want to be friends with everyone at work. Perhaps this phrasing will help; friendlier relations help teams work better together.

Or think about it like this, how productive is an unfriendly environment?

Whilst you might not want to be friends with everyone, strengthening relationships in a team makes everything easier.

Psychologist Arthur Aron developed the Fast Friends Protocol to experiment with how one might create closeness between strangers.

In his experiment, two strangers ask each other a series of 36 questions divided into 3 equal sets over 45 minutes. After each fifteen minutes, they would move onto the next set even if they hadn’t completed the set they were on.

Set One starts out fairly low-key with questions like “Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?” or “What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?”

Set Two works its way into these types of questions “What do you value most in a friendship?” and “What is your most treasured memory?”

Set Three goes deeper still and asks questions like “If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?”

Aron found that everyone who went through the process reported deepened feelings of connection.

Hmmm, I guess this might count as a team-building activity but actually the research, and I, are making two slightly different points.

The first is that reciprocity and listening to one another is a powerful way to deepen relationships. Showing a genuine interest in the lives of those around you strengthens relationships (which is the basis of high-performing teams).

Second, relationship is an iterative process. You start somewhere safe – ‘dinner guests’ – and as trust deepens, so do the questions.

It is the blend of safety and the commitment to constant growth in the relationship that creates the magic.

Think about your professional relationships. Grade them on whatever scale makes sense to you. What is the next step you could take to deepen that particular relationship?

By asking, listening, caring, and deepening relationship you can make your team happier.

(All 36 Fast Friend questions are here).

// self

Two weeks ago, I received my invitation to Africa in the World, an annual ‘heart and minds festival’ held in Stellenbosch.

I was thrilled to discover that both Abdulrakazak Gurnah and Wole Soyinka are on the bill. Two Nobel literature laureates in one place is a rare treat. I anticipate feeling like one of Swift’s Lilliputians in the company of Tolkien’s Ents. But no matter, there is joy in awe.
The invitation took me to their Nobel acceptance speeches.

Whilst it is beyond me to tie the grandeur of their writing and their achievements to our more everyday task of building teams, it does seem to me that they point us in the direction of being better humans and that is as good a place as any to begin and end.

Gurnah’s speech reflects on how he came to write.

He says that he began “not in an orderly or organised way” but “just for the relief of clarifying a little some of the confusions and uncertainties in my mind”.

Confusions that arose from the violence that had wracked post-independence Tanzania and Zanzibar. He wrote to ‘preserve memory’ and refuse the construction of simple histories.

He wrote in England where woven into the everyday fabric of life, he encountered blithe racism. And so a second wellspring was tapped, the “desire grew to write in refusal of the self-assured summaries of people who despised and belittled us”.

Although both streams are sources of pain and anger, he says he could not write only for battle, but that “writing also has to show what can be otherwise, what it is that the hard domineering eye cannot see, what makes people, apparently small in stature, feel assured in themselves regardless of the disdain of others. So I found it necessary to write about that as well, and to do so truthfully, so that both the ugliness and the virtue come through, and the human being appears out of the simplification and stereotype. When that works, a kind of beauty comes out of it” to find “for tenderness amid cruelty” and “a capacity for kindness in unlooked for sources”.

It is the joy of Gurnah’s books that whilst the violence of history washes through them, people nevertheless build love and connection. They create moments of love and humanity in the gaps that empire and tyranny cannot see.

Whilst we may never be combatants in a war, we too can be overwhelmed by large forces.

The language of productivity or restructuring or efficiency can make it seem impossible to find humanity. Gurnah reminds us that how we live, and lead, must be “to show what can be otherwise”, that by refusing simple histories, by recognising complexity, we can find space and in that space, we can grow dignity and connection.

/// soul

I had also intended to write about Prof Soyinka’s speech, but it’ll have to wait for next week. I have shared a snippet here for those of you who cannot wait.

Instead, I leave you with this thought from Susan Sontag, fiction is “an education of the heart, an education of sympathies.”

Pick up a few of Gurnah’s books. They’ve made me a better person; I hope that you have a similar experience.

Happy Sunday. See you next week.

Much love

Karl