The Pain of Teambuilding

I work in corporate America. “Teaming” or “team building” is an important part of the corporate culture. It is a subject that I find exhausting.

The people in my work group are all nice people, but we are not best friends. I don’t think we will ever be hitting the weekly happy hour. I don’t think that level of intimacy is required to function as a team. From my point of view it’s all about the common goal; the project or task that the team is working towards to further fatten the wallets of our shareholders. It’s not about lunches and outings and spending more time with people I probably see too much of already.

There are of course exceptions. I do, of course, have friends both in and outside of my current team that I “do lunch with” or share a happy hour. That is to be expected.

There are those on the team who feel like everyone needs to be best friends and has a right to know all the personal details of everyone’s life in the name of “teaming”. These folks feel that personal camaraderie is equivalent to working efficiently on a team together. Ironically these are also the most annoying people on my team. I can barely grit my teeth through an hour long meeting. Anything on a social level including hallway water cooler chit chat would be tantamount to a red hot poker through the retina and is generally best avoided.

Over the past 2 weeks our department has endured three, yes count ‘em, three, separate sessions where we “share our feelings” on a wide variety of subjects…including teaming. Sharing is exhausting and it generally produces no real outcome.

In our most recent kumbaya session our team had a mandatory visioning exercise wherein each team member looked into our crystal ball to envision how the team would “look” in the next in two years. Then we had to share with a partner, rotate partners, share some more, rotate for the third time and share again. I am not making this up! And there wasn’t even alcohol to dull the pain of this exercise. Then….wait for it….we had to share as a group and brainstorm. URGH! Stop the insanity!

One of the comments shared was we needed to do more teambuilding because and I quote “someone one aisle over was having a personal major life event and we all didn’t know about it” . Ummmm. It’s personal and therefore not required fodder for corporate consumption.

This is the kind of thinking that keeps me in SuperCash tickets each week while simultaneously counting down until retirement so I can walk away from cubicle living and never look back.