Friday's Team building was a Yaaawwwnnn...

as expected, but it showed one thing.

We do have a team in the unit, but it's more like "team plus one", The Dark Prince being the "one". Again, no surprise there...

Myself and a couple of others had planned on turning the session into a "bitch and moan hour", but the way things transpired, it just didn't happen. Refreshingly, the morning focussed on positives, rather than negatives. Me, I'm convinced that the session should have been conducted at a later stage, after the planned "bitch and moan". And then, to bring the team together, have a team building session followed by some or other activity outside of the work environment.

I believe that, to show a team that you are actually interested in sorting out issues, you first need to identify, and then address, the issues at hand. Break the problem down into its smallest components, as it were. Then address each of the issues and give feedback to the "team" to show that you're not just paying lip service to the problems.

Not our management though. They seem to think that the "problem" sits within the team and not the larger corporation. Even though everyone, even the newest of staff who have only been with us a couple of months, can identify processes, tools, bureaucracy and red tape that are inhibitors to creativity and teaming, management think the problem exists with the people and that the the "wekkas" have a kak attitude (not management, they never have a kak attitude).

Anyway...we have the teaming session, which ends about 2pm. At one point, we have to rate what we perceive are each other's individual strengths, from a list of nouns. Words like "achiever", "relator", and "harmony" (among others) are there to choose from. I went through the list and tried to identify which I felt most comfortable with for myself and ended up being not too far off from what the group thought. It was refreshing to see that the team thought of my strengths as: analytical, commanding, communicative, deliberative, disciplined, focussed and strategic. I had rated myself as "self-assured" and I guess it's one word that describes all of the above together.

The joke among the group was that there were no nouns like "dickhead" and "wanker" to describe management.

And just when the Dark Prince thought he was going to get away with not being rated by disappearing "on a client call", I brought it to the facilitator's attention and she made sure he was rated when he returned. The only problem was that he rated himself, and did not pay heed to the nouns that the team had used for him. Suffice it to say, they were not the same ones as he used. Someone had even used the unlisted word "frigger" (in jest, I assume, or maybe not).

So after we walked out of the room, all chatty and feeling good about ourselves, we packed up our laptops and headed off for a game of ten pin bowling. Whoa!! This was, after all, company time and there would be no alcohol-soaked games allowed. Such activities are scorned by senior management. Fuckin' lot of self-important stuffed shirts...

Anyway, we all ended up playing two games, almost everyone complaining afterwards of sore arms and wrists, but it was quite good fun except for the cliques that formed as expected. Lack of control or team allocation saw all the usual cliques form and gather at the lanes. Who cares, I thought, we were there to have fun and we did...laughing at each other, rolling the balls down from a backward stance through our legs, cheering every time the ball went into the gutter. Natalie ended up getting a free one-year bowling membership for having the lowest score and Caroline, ex-league bowler, got a cheap trophy to stick on her mantlepiece.

That wasn't what it was about though. It was about teaming and socialising, something sadly lacking in the company. But there have been promises from the Dark Prince to hold these events regularly to maintain the sense of teaming. He forgets that one team building session maketh not a team though and it's going to take more than that to keep morale up.

Next time it'll be the bitching session, which should prove very interesting...