Building Teams First – Buildings Next

Team building is one of those touchy feely ideas that usually gets placed on the priority list alongside dentist office visits and polar bear swimming competitions.  This is probably because everyone feels that there are so many more important things to do on a construction project than have some team building event when everyone could be spending their time thinking of ways to suck more money out of their opponent.  While there may be a long list of work activities that are more important than building a strong cohesive team, there also may be reason to believe that stronger teams could produce more successful construction projects.

Visit this website called the Pici and Pici to know more about the key points to keep in mind while team building and how to work together. You can also enroll yourselves in their various professional workshops to reap better benefits.

The biggest problem, in my mind, is that building teams takes time.  Time is what construction projects don’t have.  Time is the arch rival of project success.  The excuse for why something isn’t done is always…..you guessed it, time.

I’ve seen owners put together some lame team building exercise where one or two people from the owner, architect, and contractor all go out for an afternoon and play four square or do that thing where one person falls backwards and the other people have to catch them.  Just for the record, if I was the contractor and I had to trust that the owner was going to catch me, I think I’d politely bow out of the team building exercise.

I just finished a project where an owner, owner’s representative, architect, and two prime contractors worked together for nearly a year on a project.  In my short career, I’ve noticed that a year is not a lot of time.  I’ve been involved in projects where a group of twenty people were thrown on a job and the group dynamics resemble that of a dinner party with the Capulets and Montagues.  However, I’ve noticed the team begin to improve at about the six month mark and when the team approached the year point, they start to move into a team building state called: performing.  This project I recently finished was no different.

You may have heard about the forming, storming, norming, performing stages of teambuilding.  This model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965 and was later adopted by the Boy Scouts of America.  I’ve actually seen this take place on construction projects, but the problem that I have also seen is that right when we start to hit that performing state, the project ends and everyone explodes to a new company or project.

I’d love to see owners, contractors, and architects stay together for the next job, just like you try to keep the offfensive line and defensive backfield in tact on your football team.  However, the bidding process and the obsession with low cost and hard bidding kind of puts a damper on this.

Maybe in the future we can form, storm, and norm on the first job, and then perform on the next one.

Vote for the best construction blog