At the first team meeting, leaders tend to want to get to work on project tasks immediately. Sometimes team leaders who might be willing to spend time building the team are pressured by members to “get on with it.” As a result, little time is spent giving members the chance to get to know each other, build trust, voice expectations/goals, establish credentials, discuss desired roles, raise concerns, etc. That approach is viewed as a waste of time instead of as a necessary warm-up step in creating a high-performance team. When the team starts to have problems later, everyone gets frustrated and things can come to a halt.
It’s easy to see what happens when you don’t accomplish task-related work at a meeting: you still have to do it and you can start to fall behind on your project schedule. It happens immediately and the connection is obvious. Since there’s so much to do, and nobody wants to waste time, the need to go, go, go becomes overwhelming. Who has time for this “touchy-feely” stuff, right?
It’s much harder to see what happens when you don’t take the time to build the team. Sometimes the effect is not seen for a while. And most people don’t recognize the connection between not spending time building a team and subsequent problems with that team, such as people not attending meetings, tasks not getting done, time wasted in pointless discussions, inability to make decisions, people behaving badly, etc.
It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do your own DOE to prove cause and effect, so take our word for it: studies have shown that time spent on teambuilding pays off in team effectiveness. Resist the temptation to push for a lot of task-related work at the first meeting. Concentrate instead on soliciting the “Voice of the Team” and establishing the foundation you’ll need to successfully complete your Six Sigma project. Remember: when it comes to creating a successful team, it’s “pay me now or pay me later”!