Team Building to Team Development (2 of 4)

Part 2 of From Team Building to Team Development. The fade is not a discipline problem, and the thing most teams do to fix it makes it worse.

This is Part 2 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.

In Part 1 I argued that a workshop is an event, that events end, and that the fix is not a longer workshop. Before I get to what the fix actually is, I owe you the reason it fades in the first place. Get the reason wrong and you will confidently fix the wrong thing.

So let me tell you about a ring. One ring to rule them all. Wait, that's a different story ...

Fifteen naps

I wear an Oura ring, which lets me track and measure the quality of my sleep. Last month I averaged six hours and eight minutes a night, and twenty six minutes of deep sleep. Deep sleep is the worst scoring thing about me by a wide margin.

I also took fifteen naps. Fourteen and a half hours of daytime sleep in one month.

What is interesting is that I started napping in order to FIX a problem.

My ring told me my sleep debt was increasing. So I decided, very reasonably, that I would sleep more. The trouble was that my body kept waking me up in the morning and would not let me sleep in. So I took a nap instead.

Little did I realize I was making the problem worse with my temporary fix.

Sleep runs on pressure

Here is the mechanism.

You build sleep pressure all day, and that pressure is what buys you the deep sleep at night. A nap spends it early.

So I would get up from a very pleasant fifty minute nap feeling much better, lie down that night with nothing left in the tank, and collect twenty six minutes of the only sleep that actually repairs anything.

The nap is not rest. It is a withdrawal against the night.

And no, you cannot make it up later. My best night of sleep that month was eight hours and fifty eight minutes. It did not fix the month. There is no single great night that compensates for an absent rhythm.

Now think about workshops like naps

A team does a CliftonStrengths® workshop. It is genuinely great. If it was a really great workshop you might see the energy hold for a few weeks.

But then it drifts. And eventually most people cannot even tell you their top five anymore, which is my single biggest indicator that a person or a team has stopped using their top talents.

So somebody says we should do something about this.

If the team is still bought into the concept of Strengths, they set up another workshop. If they are not, they go looking for something else. Insights Discovery, Myers Briggs, Working Genius.

The REPEAT workshop is the nap.

It feels responsible. It relieves the symptom. But it quietly spends the exact pressure that would have forced somebody to build a rhythm instead.

It faded on my own team

I know this because I did it to my own team.

We had it. Everyone knew each other's themes and we used the language in our real work, not in a binder. It was working.

Then a quarter got heavy, the way quarters do, and I let the meetings where we talked about it get bumped. It was never a decision. It just kept losing to something louder.

The language faded. On MY team. Run by a Gallup Certified CliftonStrengths® Coach with decades of practice and experience.

That is the part I want you to sit with, because the usual explanation for a fade is that people were not committed enough. That is almost never it. My team was committed. I was committed. I do this for a living.

It faded because it was never on a rhythm, and nothing without a rhythm survives a heavy quarter.

When a kick start IS the right call

This is the caveat I promised in Part 1.

Naps are not evil. If you have genuinely pulled an all nighter, take the nap. It is the correct intervention for that specific situation, and refusing it on principle is just stubbornness.

The same is true of workshops. If your team has never heard of CliftonStrengths®, run the workshop. If half your team is new since the last one, run the workshop. If the language has been dead for two years and nobody remembers their themes, run the workshop. A kick start is a legitimate thing to need.

But a kick start is not a DEVELOPMENT program.

The same way you need to sleep every night, for Strengths to become genuinely useful it has to be top of mind regularly. If that sounds like a lot, it is. At first.

After the workshop you need daily, or at minimum weekly, habits that eventually turn into performance.

Cadence beats intensity

Here is the hierarchy, and it runs in the opposite direction to most people's instinct:

One minute a day beats fifteen minutes a week. Which beats one hour a month. Which beats four hours every quarter.

The same way you cannot nap your way out of sleep debt, you cannot brush your teeth for eight hours the morning of your appointment to make up for six months of not brushing.

Which gives us the cleanest way to say the whole thing.

Going to the dentist is Team Building. Brushing your teeth every day is Team Development.

Both are equally important. One of them you schedule twice a year and it is genuinely necessary. The other one nobody photographs, nobody celebrates, and it is the one that actually decides the outcome.

In Part 3 I will show you exactly what the brushing looks like, including one team that ran it for a full year.

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**More in this series**

Part 1: Why Does a Great CliftonStrengths® Workshop Still Fade?

Part 2: Why Your Team Stopped Using Their CliftonStrengths® Language (this article)

Part 3: What Ongoing CliftonStrengths® Development Actually Looks Like

Part 4: The Three Steps of Team Development

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 and tell me what you are planning: 

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