{"id":432,"date":"2011-02-15T20:34:33","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T03:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.constructonomics.com\/blog\/?p=432"},"modified":"2019-02-22T21:28:18","modified_gmt":"2019-02-23T04:28:18","slug":"team-building-does-it-really-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/15\/team-building-does-it-really-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Teams First – Buildings Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

Team building is one of those touchy feely ideas that usually gets placed on the priority list alongside dentist office visits and polar \"team\"bear swimming competitions.\u00a0 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\u00a0everyone could be spending their time thinking of ways to suck more money\u00a0out\u00a0of their opponent.\u00a0 While there may be a long list of\u00a0work activities\u00a0that are more important than building a strong\u00a0cohesive team, there also may be reason to believe that stronger teams could produce more successful construction projects.<\/p>\n

Visit\u00a0this website<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem, in my\u00a0mind, is that building teams takes time.\u00a0 Time is what construction projects don’t have.\u00a0 Time is the arch rival of project success.\u00a0 The excuse for why something isn’t done is always…..you guessed it, time.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0play four\u00a0square or do that thing where\u00a0one person\u00a0falls backwards and the other people have to catch them.\u00a0 Just for the record, if I was the contractor and I had to\u00a0trust that the owner was going to catch me, I think I’d politely bow out of the team building exercise.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 In my short career, I’ve noticed that a year is not a lot of\u00a0time.\u00a0 I’ve been involved in projects where a group of twenty people were thrown on\u00a0a job and the group dynamics resemble that of a dinner party with the Capulets and Montagues.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This project I recently finished was no different.<\/p>\n

You may have heard\u00a0about the forming, storming, norming,\u00a0performing <\/a>stages of teambuilding.\u00a0 This model of group\u00a0development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965 and was later adopted by the Boy Scouts of America.\u00a0 I’ve actually seen this take place on construction projects, but the problem\u00a0that I have also seen is that right when we start to hit that performing state, the\u00a0project ends and everyone explodes to a new company or\u00a0project.<\/p>\n

I’d love to see\u00a0owners, contractors, and architects stay together for\u00a0the next job, just like you try to keep the offfensive line and defensive backfield in tact on your football team.\u00a0 However, the bidding process and the obsession with low cost and hard bidding kind of puts a damper on this.<\/p>\n

Maybe in the future we can form, storm, and norm\u00a0on the first job, and then\u00a0perform on the next one.<\/p>\n

Vote for the best construction blog<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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\u00a0everyone could be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1745,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432\/revisions\/1745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/constructonomics.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}