If you're in HR, you're known
to be in HR; that's what you do for the business. So
obviously you have certain criteria for success. You
pick people for jobs, you move them around jobs, you
pick promotions and pay-rises and so on, so if that HR
person is then running a team-building exercise, you
often find that the participants are wondering what actually
is going on. Is there a hidden agenda? Am I being assessed
for a job I have, assessed for a job I may get, etc?
Is there a hidden agenda that I don’t know about?
It may not even be obvious to people but they’ll
get that feeling.
If you bring in somebody completely from outside, the
slate is clean so that an outside facilitator can ask
questions – even the dumbest, most obvious questions – but
they come clean and it’s amazing what people will
tell them and what people will share.
There’s also inevitably no hidden agenda, people
don’t know them, they don’t know how to react;
it’s a different situation. There’s no history
for example with an outside facilitator, whereas with
an HR Director, an HR Manager, there is.
Maybe they get on well, maybe they don’t. So an
event run by outside facilitators, certainly with the
guidelines of the HR Managers, because they know about
the company, and that’s vital, the external facilitator
holding hands in a professional fashion, with the HR
Manager, will get an excellent result, no question about
that, but on the whole I don’t suggest internal
people run sessions because if your mate or your colleague
is running the team-building session, you’re likely
to do what you’ve always done – you’ll
act in the same way because you’re used to that
person, you know how to respond to that person.
So you’ll do what you’ve always done and
you’ll get what you’ve always got. If you
want to get something different then you’ve got
to do something different. You’ve heard it before,
but it’s true.
So spend the money, invest in Team-Building and make
the difference.
Not doing team-building can cost you a great deal of
money.
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