Working with students and corporate executives in Team Building & Leadership simulations I see a great deal of cheating.

Not, the were being creative by staying within the guidelines kind of cheating . The I know the rules and choose to violate them anyway  kind of cheating.

Work also has rules, guidelines, policies, regulations. If some of the regulations are violated someone can get fired, the company can receive a fine, lose funding, and several other things.  People also violate these rules.

When I see this happen in the activities portion, that always leads me to this processing question.

• What, if any violations of the rules happened?
• If we behaved in the same manner, and purposely violated regulations what could happen?
• Why would you choose the break the rules today, here, in that last activity?

That final question always get a response in a similar fashion. This is just a game and it doesn’t really matter.

On to the Inquiry:

In reference to the response above This is just a game and it doesn’t really matter.

Here is my usual response

• I agree it does not matter, so why would you cheat on something that, as you said does not matter?
• What are your actions when something does matter?
• When something does matter, how will you react to that?
• What are you willing to do, when it really does matter?

A team building activity is meant as a reflective-learning piece. Something where you can have an experience, learn some new skills, take some risks and make choices without the companies and your future on the line. 

If you are willing to cheat on something that admittedly has little bearing on your work and life. Then when you are faced with a real challenge in work, life – how far are you willing to cheat to make it right?

michael cardus is create-learning

image by by skipgo shannon

• 12/27/11 – Photos of Teams
• 12/28/11 – Images used in presentations & Articles
• 12/29/11 – Team Building & Leadership activity (simulation)
• 12/30/11 – Blog article
• 12/31/11 – NEW YEARS!

Favorite Team Building & Leadership Activities + Simulations 2011

• In no particular order.

Some of these were posted here. Some were leaked super secret like to the Create-Learning Letter a mostly-monthly e-newsletter that has TeamBuilding, Leadership & experiential theory + activities CLICK HERE to sign-up.

Planning Path

• Planning Path forces the teams to clarify accountabilities of the plan and necessary time-frames coordinating the effort of all the individuals into one system

Communicate This & Stick it here!

• Complex simulation illustrating communication by people listening and sharing  information in a manner that other people can understand the message being received as well as sent.

Processing the Experience Using Mouse Traps

• Utilizing an active reviewing method (as opposed to a passive method which is question & answer) aids people in creating brain based connection from the team building activity to their work, lives, community, etc…

Sky Bottle Commander

• Real-Time planning at the location of the problem to be solved.

Cycle Time Puzzle Variation: Puzzle Connection

• Puzzle Connection focuses on collaboration and decision making. Teams practice problem solving and communication skills, and increase their understanding of the need for constant communication between existing teams.

New Door to One Word

• Here is an opening activity that I use in DiSC Workshops. The purpose is to open the understanding of perceptual awareness and that we all have beliefs about ourselves, others, and our organization.

D–Quick Choice

• For participants to experience a D – Dominance type culture. In this activity all people are asked to use their Dominance to accomplish a task that has a tight time frame and a decision must be made.

DTC Operator

• Dimension Time Cost Operator (DTC) – is a tool for for seeing problems differently exploring ideas of extremes in size and cost. The DTC Operator can work to release Psychological Inertia.

Nine Windows

• Using nine windows serves us in discovering solutions by understanding the problem in the context of the past, present and future along with exploring the problem in the Super-System, current System, and Sub-System.

Plan:Do:Check:Act

• Individuals on teams when involved in challenges are really close to the problem and taking a Plan:Do:Check:ACT (PDCA) break will create clarity and teach a model of action steps and solutions finding in real-time examples.

everyone BUT YOU knows the best choice

• In what ways, besides just telling you which rope was the correct choice, could the people and teams support, guide, serve your team in making the right choice?

How To Process + De-Brief Team Building Activities

• Team Building Facilitators lead activities that add value to the organization, team and person. This is established and created through purposeful processing and de-briefing of the activities. Allowing for functional tie-backs and applications

Now Your Turn;

In the comments share your favorite team building & leadership activity or simulation.

What an amazing year 2011 was! Looking forward to meeting and working with your team and leaders in 2012.

michael cardus is create-learning

How does one lead AWESOME team-building programs? The ones that ensure that content and learning take place. A teambuilding program that is fun, and teams leave better than when they arrived? click here for the how-to book.

The STAR method is a behavioral interviewing method that organizations use to explore predictors of performance.

This STAR method can also be used for processing (de-briefing) a team building and training simulation.

Here is the Model – from MIT Careers Office

STAR Method

• Situation: give an example of a situation (goal, task, planning, project, etc.) you were involved in.
• Task: describe the tasks the you were directly involved in that situation.
• Action: talk about the various actions that you were directly involved in the situation’s task.
• Results: what results directly followed because of your actions.

The use of open ended questions and ability for reflection fit into the Experiential Learning Model where learning and transferable application of skills is processed.

Processing TeamBuilding Experience

Here is my alternative facilitation processing application of the STAR method.
The team completes a team building activity, then the facilitator guides the team in the following manner;

Situation: What from the (situation) experience resulted in a positive outcome?

Task: Describes the tasks (steps, processes, planning, etc…) involved that resulted in that positive outcome.

Action: share with the team your personal actions involved in the task (steps, processes, planning, etc…) the personal action is used because every person experiences differently. Once the individual contributors share their knowledge a deeper pool of team knowledge can be constructed to read more about this

Results: Describe the results. How can we transfer these team & personal actions that led to these results back to your team (organization, community, family, etc…)? List the action steps that can be taken to implement the new actions (learnings, skills, communication, etc…).

Create-Learning Team Building & Leadership offers Team Building & Leadership Train-the-Trainer programs. Interested? Contact Mike

michael cardus is create-learning

image by Neal.

Systems-Drive-Behavior if you are seeing outcomes that you don’t want then we must examine the system that created that behavior. This will force you to face what you believe vs. evidence, and one of those has to win.

To create an evidence based system that drives the behavior you need contact Mike.

Every job I have ever had I have found myself skeptically wondering if what I think I am doing and what I am actually doing match.

When it comes to Team Building there are skeptics out there, and I tend to agree with most of them. There are also many cheerleaders and I agree with some of them. The more I read and study and apply my trade of Team Building & Leadership the more I see the good, the bad and the ugly. Making me say,

Sometimes I feel like team building is sweet frosting on a shit cake!

That statement needs some unpacking. Foundationally I can say with certainty that Systems-Drive-Behavior. When teams are NOT functioning, people are NOT doing their best work, changes in the Goals:Roles:Procedures and management system will improve the teams productivity and individual effectiveness.

TeamBuilding when thought of as a ‘quick-fix’ the company has fun, BUT then the changes expected don’t happen. Just like the sweet frosting on the shit cake.

The sweet frosting is the Recreation, feel good program (which can be accomplished). The cake is the Organizational System that the team and people work in. The cake is the overwhelming power in the lives and work of the teams. We all know and have felt this. 

It is easier to scrape the frosting and cover the cake than it is to Scrap the cake and attempt to make a new one. Making a new cake takes time and change that people say they are uncomfortable with. Yet, when you sit and speak with them, they hate eating this cake and are scared that a change to the cake might reveal that they (as an employee / ingredient in this cake) are also shit. That their skilled knowledge and abilities are part of the reason that the company is failing.

This is ingrained all the way up the hierarchy, and people would rather keep their heads down, follow some new fad in personal development, then really explore the organizational system and improve it.

I find many teams, managers, people know that the system is shit they just don’t know how or don’t have the skills & knowledge to fix it, or cannot stop because they are already so deep that they are asphyxiating in their doom loops.

You and the people who work with you WANT to do their best work they want to eat great cake with the sweet frosting.

No matter how many times you scrape and add new frosting, the cake (the system you work in) will not change and the behaviors and problems seen, unseen, felt and unfelt will continue.

How do we Fix This?

• I am going to explore this more in-depth in future articles.

Change to the cake can take place. It requires breaking a few eggs, beating some batter and like all great baking Following and enforcing the proper use of steps and Quality Tools. Creating a kick ass organization, like baking a great cake cannot be done by ‘winging it’ you have to have a process and you MUST adhere to it.

Here is an effective way to start this process in the following order;

• Determine and establish the necessary structure of managerial layering. Are there too many levels, too few, just enough levels within your organization. The guess-work of how many managerial layers to have causes dis-trust and halts any innovation within the organization.
• Carry out a talent pool analysis of the employees starting with the CEO and working to the Front-Line Staff. How can you capture the capabilities of the people working if you have no idea just what they are capable of. Once you determine each persons capabilities. Succession planning, training & development all become clearer, and tied to the business goals.
• Ensure role filling, from top to bottom, with individuals with capability that matches each role. Putting the right people, with the right ability to handle complexity, that value the work, have the necessary skilled knowledge, contain the needed wisdom, and temperament to fill that role in those roles. Moving, de-selecting and possibly terminating people who are not able to be effective in that role, is tough; Especially when they were promoted for the wrong reasons.
• Establish a compensation structure related to boundaries of the layer and level of work. Compensation that matches the felt ‘weight’ of the work shows respect and a system for compensation is understood. Similar work, that have similar time-spans and complexity are compensated similarly.
• Conduct training to enable all managers to implement all requisite managerial leadership practices. If we are to make the organization function then certain things must be known and understood. One major area is that the Manager is to be held accountable for the work of the subordinates. For this to happen clear roles responsibilities, procedures, and accountabilities must be reinforced and equitable.

What Do You Think?

Does this analogy reflect your thinking? What ideas do you have to ‘fix the cake’?  What examples do you have quick-fixes ‘frosting’ that have been successful in the past? How would you go about improving your organization?

michael cardus is create-learning

image by by melloveschallah

Referenced: Requisite Organization; Elliot Jaques 1989. Page Pair 130

I talk, write and read a great deal about ‘systems’, organizational, team, managerial leadership systems.

Then one day an Executive involved in my Exponent Leadership Process asked, “Mike you talk about this system, I am not sure I know what that means?” I stood there for a short time and gave a rather weak response, thanked him for his question and said, “Huh…that is a good question and I am fumbling, I know what it is but I cannot describe it SO using my own logic I must not really know what it is! And this is the challenge of Managerial-Leadership and Organizational-Development ill-defined terms.”

The team of executives and I then spent 40 minutes defining their system, creating clear and distinct understanding and wording to describe what the system they work in is; what they would like it to be; and steps to move towards achievement. 

BUT that did not answer the question, of what is a system? I researched and found the following in Steve de Shazer’s book “Putting Difference to Work” (Shazer 1991, p.21). It stems from a psychological frame exploring the ‘family’ as a system. I feel that the attributes or properties are also encompassing of Organizational Systems. I intend to explore each of the following more in depth with examples and application.

General Attributes or Properties of a System

• 1. Wholeness: A change in one part of a system necessarily affects the whole system.
• 2. Non-summativity: The whole is different from the sum of its parts. (emphasis added)
• 3. Equifinality, multifinality: Equifinality means that the final state may be reached from different initial states and/or by different paths; Multifinality means that similar initial conditions, and/or routing different paths, may lead to dis-similar end states.
• 4. Circular causality, nonlinearity: “The relationship of the progression of causes is such that the initial cause is also affected by the progression itself” (Simon et. al., p.212) which is contrasted with linearity in which “feedback processes are not involved…the cause-effect sequence does not lead back to the starting point.” (Simon et. al., 1985, p. 212)

Are you still with me? I know the above reads like a psychological nightmare. For now the important thing to know about systems, YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THEM.  In the next couple days I am going to explore the above attributes or properties of systems and hopefully make sense.

Now Your Turn;

How would you define an Organizational System? What attributes or properties would you add, subtract, change? What is one system you are involved in, how do you know?

michael cardus is create-learning

image by by johannviloria

One area of focus was decision making and how this group can support you in making choices and learning from the choices made. I decided to use an activity I call

‘Choosing Choice to Choose Connection’

• Overview: Teams of 3-6 are supplied with 4 ropes tied in loops, 1 rope connects all the ropes like a key ring. The teams have to choose which rope connects them all together.
• Outcomes: The ability to practice making decisions that have no clear answer, all that can be done is choose which one looks like the best answer. This becomes complicated when in work teams. Practice in creation of a decision making systems for agreement as well as listening + speaking for collaboration is necessary.

While processing the activity with the teams I asked;

I am going to ask you a weird question, Pretend that we all go on break and during this break your team does what it normally does on break…But unknown to the members of your team everyone else was shown which rope is the correct rope to choose. BUT your team did not know this because you all were on a break. In what ways, besides just telling you which rope was the correct choice, could the people and teams support, guide, serve your team in making the right choice?

Each team them had ~8-10 minutes to create lists and discuss the question.

WOW! the responses were awesome and really tied SO WELL into creating a community of support for the students and faculty.

Now Your Turn;

• Think about the question above; How would you respond? Your team respond? Your boss respond? Your subordinate respond?
• In what ways could you alter this question to be appropriate with your team?
• If everyone BUT you knew the correct choice – How would you go about asking them questions to find the answer? How would you treat them the same or differently?

Share your usages and ideas.

michael cardus is create-learning