Team Building to Team Development (1 of 4)

Part 1 of From Team Building to Team Development. The workshop was bought as an event, and events end. Here is how to tell which rung your team actually landed on.

This is Part 1 of a four part series on why CliftonStrengths® workshops fade and what to do instead. It follows an earlier series on facilitating your first workshop, and it starts where that one ended: with a workshop that went well, and a Monday that did not.

The fix I am embarrassed I did not start years ago

At the end of my last series I admitted something. I did not fully implement my own closing advice at my most recent workshop. The room ran long, the close got compressed, and the action plan I tell every facilitator to protect was the thing that got squeezed.

I said that if people replied, I would tell them how I was fixing it.

Here is the fix. I asked for a second conversation.

That is the whole thing. No better deck. No tighter agenda. A meeting on the calendar with AbbVie to build the action plans we ran out of room for on the day.

And somewhere between putting that meeting on the calendar and writing about it, I realized it was the answer to a much bigger question I have been circling for years.

Why does a workshop that goes great still fade?

Let me start with what it is not.

It does not mean bad facilitation. It does not mean a disengaged team. I have presented workshops where there were lines of participants waiting to tell me that the day changed their life. Those days were not failures of delivery.

But that workshop was an EVENT. And events end.

It was a mountaintop experience, and eventually everybody climbs back down the mountain.

That is not a criticism of workshops. It is just reframing a workshop as what it actually is: an event in time. Events are excellent at some things and structurally incapable of others, and knowing which is which saves you a great deal of frustration six months later.

Look at how we measure a great day

Think about the signals you use to decide a session went well.

The energy in the room. The feedback form. The team that invites you to their divisional celebration dinner afterward, which happens to me more often than you would expect from a guy whose Woo® sits near the bottom of his 34.

Those signals are real. I am not dismissing a single one of them, and I would be suspicious of any facilitator who did.

But read that list again.

Every one of those is a Team Bonding or a Team Building signal.

Bonding, Building, Development

Most teams cannot tell you which of these three they actually bought, so it is worth being precise.

• Team Bonding is the short event that connects you better to your teammates. You spent time together and you like each other more. This is the foundation, and it matters, because trust starts here. A dinner, an offsite, a shared afternoon somewhere that is not the office. Bonding is where connection begins.

• Team Building is the day, or the week, that hands your team a shared experience and a shared language. This is the next required rung. A CliftonStrengths® session lands here naturally, because handing 34 theme names to a room is a genuinely great Team Building day. People walk out able to say "my Achiever® is why I do that" and be understood.

• Team Development is something else entirely. It is when the way your team actually works together on a Tuesday is different from how it worked before. Not better understood. Different.

Those three are not options on a menu. They are rungs, and you do not get to skip one. You cannot build on a team that does not trust each other yet. And you cannot develop a team that has no shared language to develop with.

Which means a great deal of the frustration I hear about workshops is not a workshop problem at all. It is a rung problem. A team bought Team Building, got exactly what they paid for, and expected Team Development.

No single event can do the next job

A workshop cannot do the next job. In fact, no single event can.

This is worth sitting with, because the instinct when a session fades is to look for a better session. A more experienced facilitator. A longer agenda. A different framework entirely.

None of those change the structural fact. An event is bounded in time. Development is not.

The tell

Here is the tell, and it took me embarrassingly long to see it.

If the only thing on the calendar after your workshop is next year's workshop, or nothing at all, you did Team Building.

Nothing wrong with that. Team Building is a good rung and it did its job. But do not be surprised when the language fades, and do not conclude that the workshop was a waste when what actually happened is that it ended, exactly as an event does.

Go and look right now. Open the calendar for the team that had a session this year. What is scheduled? If the honest answer is nothing, you have your diagnosis, and it is a much more fixable one than "our people did not buy in."

The fix is not a longer workshop

I want to be clear about this, because the instinct is always to add a day.

There is a caveat to that, and I will come back to it in Part 2, because there are genuinely times when more workshop is the right call. But adding a day to an event does not stop it being an event. Two mountaintops is still a mountain range you eventually climb down from.

The fix is something different, and it is what the rest of this series is about.

---

More in this series

Part 1: Why Does a Great CliftonStrengths® Workshop Still Fade? (this article)

Part 2: Why Your Team Stopped Using Their CliftonStrengths® Language: (coming Aug 11)

Part 3: What Ongoing CliftonStrengths® Development Actually Looks Like: (coming Aug 18)

Part 4: The Three Steps of Team Development: (coming Aug 25)

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. If your team has one coming up this year, connect with me on LinkedIn or contact me here and tell me what you are planning.

Social Media

Watch some free videos online via my social media accounts!