I Love Team Building Blog

Buy Team Building Like You Buy IT

On Company - Friday, July 11, 2008

A lot of time and money is wasted by organizations because they have a disorganized approach to team building. Senior managers need to use a more strategic approach when it comes to purchasing team building services. Consider the following analogy. Imagine a company has identified the need for 1000 new computers. Would the following not be true?

  1. The IT department analyzes needs, maybe even interviews users.
  2. The budget is recommended by IT (perhaps with various options), or provided by management, but based on a real analysis of the situation.
  3. The same platorm is implemented across the whole company or at least a division or department.
  4. One supplier is used, which results in a good price to the company.
  5. The supplier has a very good overall knowledge of the company and its needs.
Let's compare that with how companies typically source and purchase team building:
  1. A very limited needs analysis is conducted.  I would even argue that most leaders dont even know WHY they need to team build, they just know that they need to.
  2. The budget is unknown or vague at best.  Or it is unrealistically low.
  3. Each group or department does their own activity, resulting in different outcomes.
  4. Each group/dept uses their own supplier, with no purchasing power from economies of scale.
  5. Suppliers are not given much background about the company and its team building needs. Indeed, the conversation is usually between an administrative assistant and the provider.
I question why companies have such a decentralized approach to team building. I suspect that part of the reason is that companies know that they need to team build, but don't know how to justify it to shareholders (hint: start with identifying clear team building objectives).  It may also have something to do with the fact that team building can come out of a variety of budgets and so senior management doesn't know how much is really being spent on team building. A more organized, strategic, high-level approach to team building will definitely result in great savings in time and money. You heard it here first!

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