I used to joke that my daughter, Clementine, was not a natural child—or at least was not my natural child. The fact that she was able to do things like walk away from a dessert table without any dessert was my first clue, but really it was when she got older and not only asked for a hairbrush, but also used one on a daily basis that made me start to question her DNA. I don’t know, it’s just that at times like those I always thought back to the moment she was born and remembered how I had my eyes squeezed pretty tightly shut the whole time. Those midwives could have handed me any old baby and I wouldn’t have known the difference.
But then she does something that is so me that I have to rethink those opinions, because there is no way two people could share such similar attitudes and not be related. Case in point: our opinions on “team building.” We both hate it.
I remember five years ago when it first came up: she came home with a permission form to participate in a “Ropes” course, one of those activities where people gain confidence in themselves and faith in their fellows by doing things like climbing to the top of a telephone pole or walking along a tightrope while being supported by the ropes of their teammates (and staff). Or rather, people without a working knowledge of the litigiousness of American society gain confidence in themselves and faith in their fellows, because the rest of us know that the chances of falling (and not being caught) are pretty close to zero. You want to build confidence and trust? Try letting your teammates pilot an overcrowded Bangladeshi ferry while you’re on the lower deck, or maybe let them pick out your dinner for you at a Somali street market. Those are exercises in confidence and trust.
For me the first realization of how much I really despised team building came in college, when I took a class on the anthropology of dance. What started out as a classroom full of people who, at their best were friendly toward one another, and, at their worst, indifferent, ended up being a classroom full of people who actively despised one another—all thanks to the fact that the professor insisted on the entire class starting and finishing each session with a mandatory group hug. (To this day I am not entirely unconvinced that the whole thing wasn’t some kind of bizarre B.F. Skinner-like social experiment, and that the whole point of the class in the first place wasn’t actually to chart our evolution from strangers to enemies.)
The point is that you cannot force a team to build, any more than you can force a friendship to form. And while I appreciate the effort that goes into these kind of things, a better approach, I think, would be to just offer some kind of incentive program to encourage people to get along in the first place. If my anthro/dance class had offered extra credit for being extra friendly, I would have been all over that.
Maybe.
Or maybe I would have decided that I’d rather study extra hard for the tests so that I could “spend” all those extra points on extra snarkiness. In retrospect, it does sound like the more appealing option. At least to me. Clementine, I know, is one of those people who would happily be nice for free. In fact, that’s one of the things we disagree about most frequently: the importance (or not) of being “nice.” (I’ll let you guess which side she’s on.)
And just like that I’m back at square one again: exactly whose baby did those midwives give me, anyway?