Team Building: It’s About the Debrief
Vidula Bal
I met Vidula Bal when she was leading management and leadership development at Mars. Author of the book, MANAGING LEADERSHIP STRESS, Vidula got her PhD at UT Austin. She has worked at the Center for Creative Leadership, and at Mars, of course. She also had a senior learning and development role at Target. She’s currently the Vice President of talent an development for AP Moller Maersk, the global shipping and logistics company.
Vidula is one of the clearest thinkers I’ve ever met on the subject of teams and collaboration. You’ll see that here as she talks about team building that works, team building that doesn’t and why teams are the real unit of organizational change.
Vidula was instrumental in the development of the team effectiveness framework we created at Mars. That same framework has become the focus of my writing and speaking, so I owe her a debt of gratitude.
teams are the unit of transformation
Vidula: First of all, Carlos, let me say thank you for that kind introduction. you sure do know how to make a girl feel welcome. So thank you for that. I really it's touching to hear you say what you said, so thank you very much. I might share about myself two things. The first is that, I'm a big fan of Peter Block's. I call him my intellectual boyfriend because I love his brain and the way that it works. One of the things that Peter Block believes and, really through reflection and thinking about Peter's work I've come to believe as well, is that the small group or the team is always the unit of transformation.
If we think about transformations in companies or in societies or NGOs wherever, it's always a group of people that get together and make magic to change what exists today. That's a fundamental belief that I hold.
conventional Team building Is a waste
The second belief that I hold, and maybe this fits into the contrarian point of view, is I think we in companies are wasting a lot of money, when we try to support and kind of generate. Team effectiveness. And so that's something that I can't wait to talk to you about. I'll share other things about myself as we get into the conversation, but those are probably the two most important things to know.
Work life for a global team mid-COVID
Vidula: I am the vice president of talent and development for AP Moller Maersk, a global integrator of container logistics. That's a lot of words to describe the fact that our vision as a company is to become the FedEx of moving containers around the world. In my role, I have a number of HR centers of expertise that report to me: Leadership development, functional development, talent management, diversity and inclusion, for example. And I have to say that the company has been super supportive of me because it's a company that's based in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I lived for a year. Then I missed my home here in the US and they've been kind enough to let me live in the US for the past two years. My team and I are all pretty well globally dispersed.
We team virtually. At first it was a challenge, and also an idea that was challenged when we first brought it up, my moving back to the US. I had some team members who were quite concerned. I actually think we've been able to be pretty effective in spite of the distance, and in spite of the challenges that COVID-19 has brought about.
I really think COVID-19 has been a bit of a dance in different parts of the world. There have been moments where people are in the office. And when people are in the office, I have four direct reports that sit in Copenhagen. I also have two that sit elsewhere: one in Spain, one in the UK, What's happened recently, with an increase of cases in Denmark, is that our office has shifted to be there only if you need to. A lot of people are working from home right now. What that means for us is we're all working from home.
Ways of Working now
I sit in Colorado, so we're eight hours behind the central European time zone. One of the very first things I committed to is that I would be present and online.
Maybe it's worth saying something about, Denmark and about Maersk in our culture as well. As you may or may not know Denmark’s office culture is very focused. People are generally in the office from 9:00 am until around 4:30 pm. The culture in Denmark is such that there's an importance put on being with your family. People think nothing of it on a regular day, if somebody leaves the office at 4:30, would that person be a man or a woman, to go pick up the kids from school, make dinner for them, etc. Then maybe people get back online, but the office hours are quite limited compared to other companies that I've worked for, say for example, Mars,
Limited office hours, not working hours.
Because the office hours are fairly well-defined, and since I’m in the US, then my commitment is that I would be online and available and having meetings beginning just after their lunch hour. My earliest commitment was that I would start my day with calls, etc., at 5:00 AM. That's one of the commitments that I've made and stuck to for this entire two years.
The other commitment that I made, I'm not sure that I made it explicitly, but I've demonstrated it on a number of occasions, is that when there are important calls, let's say with our CEO or somebody of his stature, then I'll be available for a call at any time.
I don't do that every week, or even, every few weeks, but there are exceptions where I feel like it's my responsibility to shift my working hours a bit because they're being permissive with me, or they were prior to COVID.
Prior to COVID I was traveling to Copenhagen one week a month, and there for the whole week, Monday through Friday. I think in the beginning it was necessary. The team in Copenhagen had been used to having their bosses on site and I think it was helpful that I was there frequently. However, the last time I was on a plane was in March.
Cohesiveness in a period of enforced separation
One of the things that I'm doing to maintain cohesiveness among my team members is finding meaningful opportunities for collaboration that I may have overlooked or assumed would happen in some other way before. I'll give you an example.
I'm a part of the HR leadership team of our company. One of the pieces of work that we're doing right now is trying to identify what our HR priorities are going to be for the next three years, let's say, and what's the roadmap to get there.
What will we do when? How's it going to serve the strategy and the business? One of the things that I ended up doing with my team in a virtual offsite last week was using them together to get input on some proposed initiatives that had come from other sources.
They thought that it was meaningful work. Somebody said, at the end of our meeting, how much they appreciated being asked about this future focus task, Even knowing that not everything they propose is going to be accepted or show up in the final version of the strategy, they valued the opportunity to input and influence.
I think it was meaningful for them. I don't know that leaders default to that when forced to be virtual, to try to do meaningful work like that together.
Pet Peeves surrounding team building
My first pet peeve in team building: group debriefs of assessment. Everybody takes the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Everybody takes the FIRO-B. We debrief the assessment as a team. Now, I am not saying that there is no value to that kind of exercise because I do think revealing information about ourselves and about each other can serve us. I think we often equate that kind of fun conversation with meaningful development as a team, and I don't think the two are the same.
Carlos: So, when I learn that you're an introvert and I'm an extrovert, or I learn that you're more of a sensing type where my preferences are more intuitive, certainly I can use that to work with you. Because you have certain preferences when we work together, you're going to be better at some stuff - that's valid, right? If I know you're an extrovert and I'm an introvert, we can probably make some use of that information and how we work together.
But it doesn't necessarily mean we're going to stay out of conflict anymore than we might otherwise, or necessarily get a better outcome.
Vidula: I'm not saying there's no place for it, but I find that MBTI becomes the default intervention and it makes an assumption that it's interpersonal conflict or personality conflict.
That's at the core of any issues that a team might have. I think there are often other more structural causes of conflict: task-related conflicts, role conflicts like, “I thought that was my job.” “No, I thought it was mine.”
Personal timeline exercises
Have you ever had to, when you're in a new team, do a life timeline of your own life and share it with people? I think the thing that bothers me is that it becomes a bit of a forced disclosure. I'm a fan of Wilford Bion. I do think teams cycle through phases, but I think that kind of attempt at forcing closeness with people is just misplaced. It makes people feel good for the moment, but it's not a lasting closeness.
I have to tell you a story. My best friend in college was a big dater. She dated many people. She would come home from each of her first dates, and our conversation at the end of her dates would start off saying, “Oh my gosh, I went on a date with person X and we had an awesome talk.”
Awesome talk. That meant that she was a good enough listener and encourager of men that they would divulge their deepest, darkest secrets to her on the first night that they were on a date. Those relationships rarely survived because people disclosed too early. The next day they're like, “Oh my gosh, I'm super embarrassed.”
So here is my analogy: I think that the lifeline exercise is the equivalent of the awesome talk and my best friend's dating career.
Escape room exercises
Carlos: What about the escape room - really popular now as a team building event? The team leader says, “Oh, we're going to do this awesome night at an escape room is to really teach us how to do teamwork together, solving a problem.” The assumption is we will be a better team. What do you think?
Vidula: No. Number one, you assume that the tasks in an escape room are team tasks versus a person knows how to solve clue X. They solve part of it and then the team successfully gets out of the room or whatever. By and large, I would argue that they don't necessarily build a more effective team unless the team actually sits down and has a meaningful debrief about that experience.
I'm not sure how many teams actually do that and debrief.
How did we solve the first problem that we encountered?
What did we do that we'd want to continue to do the next time we have a challenge in front of us?
What would we do differently?
That, to me, is the meaningful way to get value out of an escape room.
Carlos: I think most of our brilliant listeners would agree that after the escape room, the thing you do is drink beer, right? Go out for dinner and have a few cocktails. I've only been a part of one of those adventures. and that's what we did.
Outdoor challenges as team building exercises
So, similar things like ropes courses, for example - the outdoor challenges, same view on those, too?
Vidula: My friend, Robert Ginnett, has long said they're interesting afternoons, but unless there are some kinds of debriefs… right? And there's an old rule that says for any activity that you do as a team, you should be spending two times the amount of time debriefing as you've spent doing it. Because in theory, If you've got a team that's working on some kind of challenge, whether it's fun or a real one, there's so much going on that frankly, to do a thorough enough debrief of what's just been executed and done together should take a while.
Carlos: Yes, when you have a strong consultant / facilitator feeding back observations about what they noticed, asking questions based on the behaviors they saw, getting people to reflect deeply about how they responded to the situation and think about the effect that had on their colleagues who were working this challenge together could be very powerful. That's a very practical piece of advice that to take away.
Vidula: I've found it to come really handy in designing team interventions.
And of course, people roll their eyes, “Geez, really? We did that for 90 minutes and you want to talk about it for 180??” It's not all just sitting in a circle and chatting.
Carlos: My belief is that the only sustainable form of teams spirit is learning together. It's when we learn together around meaningful stuff that we get stronger as a team.
If my Myers Briggs workshop and my escape room are not going to make my team awesome, what is going to make my team awesome?
A Structuralist take on team building
Over the course of my learning about teams and working with teams, I've become quite a structuralist about them. I use that term loosely, I don't mean it from a philosophical perspective. I think the org design and the way you put together your team has more to do with its effectiveness than the personalities in it. And if something's wrong or missing in the structure or support to the team, you can do all the MBTI debriefs on the planet and it's not going to work. Let me give you an example.
An executive team for one of the businesses I worked with a while ago had a really ambitious business transformation to deliver, but they never quite got together as a team. They needed to be collaborative to deliver the output that the business expected them to see, and they never really pulled it off. Part of the reason was a structural reason because there was one person on the team that had an overabundance of responsibility for the key area that they were trying to transform.
The rest of them were just sort of players around the edge. The guy that owned the 80% had no need to talk to the other people. We could have done all the debriefs we wanted to do around the MBTI or FIRO-B and why this guy was taking all the control, but it wasn't an interpersonal issue. The fact that the work wasn't spread equally meant there wasn't a need because there was one person that owned most of the responsibility.
It goes back to involving your tea in meaningful work, the work that leads to better team work or collaboration. if I'm not mistaken, and to give you credit for what I think is a really amazing idea, team leaders don't often enough spend time thinking about what that meaningful, collaborative work is. They're not explicit enough.
Am I not correct in assuming that that's what professor Richard Hackman really impressed upon you? I think that's a really enlightened idea. As leaders, we sometimes just make the assumption that people will sort it out and figure out where and when they collaborate on what, but there's something around leaders being explicit about collaboration. I think at most we usually say, “I expect you to collaborate.” That doesn't go far enough.
Vidula’s message to team leaders about team building
There's a part of me that says, “Yeah. Whether it's in a COVID moment or not, the work is generally hard.” And collaboration is exhausting, as we all know. So if people want to have fun, that's great. But I think our responsibility as coaches and consultants is to tell people what they're getting for their investment: for example,
You're going to invest, let's say $10,000 in bringing Carlos Valdes-Dapena to your organization to run an MBTI session for two hours.
Here's what you're going to get.
You're going to get an opportunity to know each other better.
You're going to get an opportunity to understand why people act the way they do.
But what you're not going to get necessarily is
Sustained improvement because we're dealing at an interpersonal level.
To be honest, it's a battle. And especially if you're an internal consultant in my experience, it's a battle that you fight for forever because people want a little levity, and if we can do it in the guise of being a more effective team then, okay. But let's be honest about what they're getting.
Carlos: I've got a lot of colleagues in this business who are making their living selling the sorts of team building initiatives you and I have been is criticizing. I have to get them on board with this notion. I'll see what I can do.
I just want to say thank you. We've come to the end of our time speaking. This has been the most fun I've had in a long time, with your candor and your good sense of humor about it.
Vidula: Oh, Carlos, this was super fun. And thank you inviting me and, it makes me miss working together with you.
Carlos: Yeah. Well maybe there'll be a time in the future, right? So everybody for listening, thank you, Vidula Bal, and if you haven't read Peter Block's work, go buy some of those books!
Take care,
Carlos