Sometimes, the team away days that my organisation are asked to attend are organised just so that people can enjoy themselves. More often, though, they are being held to actually help teams improve. In other words, return them to the workplace better able to perform their duties. If a team is the easy pickings, this can be done pretty rapidly with a focused, debriefing session that is led from the front by the lead facilitator. Something a little more formalised is required if a team wants real team development. A structure that has been pre-prepared in writing can be used to gain real learning from the time spent. The key characteristic of this document needs to be that it allows people to see the connections between the activity itself and their work back at base. Sometimes people want to go beyond that and also use personality and other profiling along with the team activity.
Different people think of different things when it comes to profiling, so it makes sense to define the kind that this articles will refer to. The first kind of profiles created were all to do with identifying the key elements of an individual's personality. Based on the work of Carl Jung, tools such as the MBTI, OPQ, DISC, Facet and many, many others have all appeared and built on Jung's early work. As mentioned above, it is personality profiling that we'll focus on here.
When it comes to team building sessions, away days and the like, the problem is that these commercially available diagnostics are all pretty big things. Those involved will need to fill in a document that stretches to many pages and make take the best part of an hour to finish. Once upon a time, these documents were processed manually and involved mathematical skills and plenty of line drawing. Nowadays of course, the documents are web-based and the report production is automated. Even so, it all takes time. and when the reports are ready, the best practice is to offer individual feedback sessions with each respondent, run by a suitably qualified profiler. That session is going to take at least ninety minutes and probably longer if it is to do justice to the detail of the report.
So clearly the amount of time that doing all this will take is difficult to handle on a team away day. Logistically, only the very smallest of groups could possibly include one on one sessions and still have time available for any reasonably sized team activity. One option is for everyone to use the web facility to fill in their responses ahead of time, but that's a relatively small chunk of time to gain back. Another option is to miss out on individual feedback until another day, preferring to concentrate on the day itself on anything that comes out of the profiling that is clearly only team related. It is worth pointing out that if you chosen this option then the group would lose much of what they hoped to gain from adding profiling to the day in the first place.
Nonetheless, the logistical issues do not diminish the potential advantages in combining profiling and team building. There are ways around the problem. The team activity itself could, for example, be structured in such a way as to focus on how useful profiling outputs can be to the team members and the group as a whole. Additionally, in forming the teams for the activity it is possible to arrange things to highlight the value of teams whose members between them have all the different shades of personality types. It is easy to point out that teams dominated by people who have one common strength also tend to suffer from the common weaknesses such people naturally share.
Experience shows that there are two ways to tackle this. Firstly, do the admin work prior to the team away day happening, but only a day or two before. That way, all the information gleaned from the profiling exercise will be easy to recall on the day and it will therefore be easier to incorporate appropriate elements of it during the day. Secondly, use a less formal profiling-based diagnostic on the away day. Something that doesn't need people to fill in forms of any kind but relies instead upon an experienced facilitator is good. Ideally, it will also focus more on the team aspects of whatever comes out than on individual strengths and weaknesses. This kind of approach benefits from the Pareto rule where most of the usefulness of profiling is gained without having to do all the detail work.
In conclusion, combining team building and profiling is a neat idea and, if you can overcome the logistical challenges, well worth doing.
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