Any time we add or change membership, a team will regress in its stage of development, but we know this so let’s take a look at why and what to do.  Let’s look at it from the angle of a new team member:

In a perfect world we prefer to have our TeamBuilders WorldWide programs outdoors.  It’s great to get out of the meeting room and breathe some fresh air, but the weather doesn’t always cooperate.  What if it rains today?  We jokingly tell our participants that in the event of rain we will then default to plan “B”, It looks a lot like plan “A”, but we are wet.  We’ll get a chuckle or two, but we always have back up space in case we can’t get outdoors.  We all need a plan B, and it needs to work.

I was thinking today about the roles we play in our organizations - whether at work, school, home or on a sports team and how these roles play off of each other. Dr. Meredith Belbin’s The Belbin Team Roles  address these differences and work under the philosophy that we are all good at something, whether it’s details, new ideas or staying task driven, therefore we are probably not good at something else; so for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The ASTD Learning Circuits blog featuring Tony Karrer provides some great questions and discussions.  What I like the most about it is you can keep on digging and find sub discussions that go on and on.  It’s really very cool.  The subject of ROI came up (as it often does).

We understand that there is some value in corporate olympics, scavenger hunts, boat building, etc. but there is an element of team building and teamwork that shoul be taken very seriously.

We talk alot about teamwork, responsibility and accountability, but there is a great article in Bloomberg that drives the point home. Courtney Paris is a young basketball star at the University of Oklahoma, and she can teach us all something about accountability. A quick note: the University would not accept her repayment, so she opened a charitable fund for the money.  Awesome!