Real Team-building Comes from Real Talk

Teams do not change during the activity. They change during the conversation that follows it. I learned that the hard way in my first year running team events.

Bill Ketchen, an executive VP at Pike Construction, had hired me for what became one of my highest-scoring events and one of my biggest professional lessons. I ran an activity with knives and marshmallows built around a simple idea: how much easier the work gets when a leader actively supports the people doing it. The room loved it. They laughed. They competed. The evaluations came back strong. Months later, almost nothing had changed in how those crews worked together.

Here is the mistake, plainly. I wanted the room to have a good time together rather than build the awareness they needed to make the next workday different. The activity was fun, but I never tied it to their real work. I never asked who on their crews was carrying weight without support or what each of them actually needed from the person standing next to them.

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