Team Building and Creating a Culture

 

Have you ever been to one of those company sponsored, team building exercises at your work? The kind where you take off for a few hours to an offsite location, or a company is brought in that specializes in these type of activities? Your managers come into these with a little more enthusiasm than normal, as if they were ordered from their bosses to be more enthusiastic, or they just finished reading a manual or received a powerpoint presentation on how to be more enthusiastic. Often times they tell you at the beginning how excited they are to be there. The people running these activities are totally juiced to be there as well, as if they've found their callings in life, and that included putting you through one of their research-based, time-tested, life-altering team building exercises? Sometimes they have loud music playing, sometimes there are decorations, sometimes t-shirts are handed out. 

For these team building exercises, you usually divide up into groups and are given tasks to complete that make you feel and look really ridiculous, but should force you to work together to accomplish a goal. As you complete these tasks, I think the people who organized them expect you to bond with your fellow workers, and be inspired by what you can accomplish when you work together as a team. I think they hope you take the skills you learned in these exercises to follow you as you sit down at your desk the next day and punch in your tps reports.

The idea for these things seem to be born out of your company's management discussions around a long conference table, as managers seek ways to improve company morale, employee cooperation, and personal investment. It seems to be the first thing these managers and hr people reach for when trying to solve difficult problems within a company and workforce.

I'm currently working my way through Ed Catmull's new book Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, and it doesn't take too long into the book before you realize that Dr. Catmull is not one of these managers.

I've been impressed by the insight, the candor, and the perspective he shares with the readers into the culture and processes of the company he co-founded, Pixar as well as the one he now oversees at Disney Animation Studios.

What impresses me most about Catmull's book is the sincere desire he seems to have to analyze, diagnose, and solve the problems that exist within his own company. He recognizes the complexity of these situations, and the human natures that are creating that complexity, as well as how those human natures might be utilized and understood to solve the problems that are perplexing his company and culture. I don't' know if it's the result of his engineering and academic background, but he's able to present his thoughts and ideas in a way that is objective and refreshing, presenting the facts as almost self-evident.

I was able to personally meet and talk with Ed Catmull a year ago at the U, when he came in to view our game program and participate in some exercises we had planned for him and his engineering colleagues. In the short time I was able to talk and interact with him, I was impressed with his brilliance, humility, and the perspective with which he saw things. Immediately following our exercises with him and his group, he made a b-line to our professors and started to engage them on our program, and what he saw as common trappings and mistakes within creative endeavors. He started offering recommendations for our program as well as anecdotes from his experience at Pixar that would illustrate what he was talking about. I was impressed at the humility with which he approached this situation, and the urge he had to diagnose and offer help to those in charge of a very creative endeavor.

I don't make this post to review the book or offer my opinion about Dr. Catmull, although I have done both. Rather, I make this post because as I've worked on this project I've thought a lot about companies, cultures, teams and their leaders. I truly believe that the creation of a company and a culture is a highly creative endeavor. And I don't think we can make these things succeed in the long term unless we are willing to go through the tough and honest introspection that Catmull exhibits in this book, and even then, there's no guarantee. As I observe creative companies and organizations, it appears that rare is the individual who is aware and willing to perform the kind of self surgery needed to overcome the problems that exist in their companies. It's difficult to fault them in this however, because I think it's a very difficult thing to do. But it'd be nice to have more people that did so.