Team-building and Reflective Practice*

There are many ways to improve the performance of groups that make up the subsystems within an organization. Because of what we know about systems theory, it is often best to involve everyone in the group in working together to assess the status of the group, to identify areas where controls need to be enhanced, where problems need to be fixed, where processes need to be improved, and where new innovations need to be developed or introduced. This is, in essence, what teambuilding is all about.

One way to improve the performance of a system is to invest some time to allow members of the team to talk about how the team is working. This discussion can help team members assess where they are in terms of the effectiveness of the team, making it possible for team members to talk about their performance strengths and weaknesses in a positive way.(1)

One effective way for the team to diagnose itself is through the use of a metaphor for discussion. This is often done effectively by identifying a metaphor that helps people discuss their team’s performance in a nonthreatening way. This is an approach to teambuilding that does not employ “touchy feely” methods, but which employs a process known as reflective practice to encourage discovery and learning.

Reflective practice is a concept pioneered among adult educators to create new learning about life situations. As a learning tool, reflective practice involves people in critiquing their presuppositions on which their beliefs about a situation have been built. (2) Educators employ a variety of tools to stimulate reflective thinking, such as group discussions, structured interviewing techniques, role playing, and workshops. For example, Victoria Marsick, at Columbia University, has documented reflective practice workshops taught at the Management Institute in Lund, Sweden, in which participants work on team projects and critique their participation and challenge one another’s thinking to gain self insight. (3)

A reflective practice team-building session brings team members together and starts by using exercises and ideas that help people “get out of the box” to create new revelations about how the team functions on a daily basis. Quality facilitators at Lockheed Martin have used reflective practice team-building to encourage participants to assess their work groups and examine their current behaviors from different perspectives. (4)

Using Sports as a Metaphor

The world of professional sports is very different from the everyday work world for most employees. Professional athletes are paid very high salaries for performing in a very public manner. Coaches prepare the athletes to perform using a disciplined set of specialized skills. This type of guidance rarely exists in the workplace.

However, there are many good reasons to use a sports metaphor to open up dialogue and discussion that promote reflective practice within an organization. First, most organizations can relate their work to a particular type of sporting event. Second, many people are sports enthusiasts and will engage with a sports metaphor once they understand how it connects to their work. Third, the use of a sports metaphor encourages creative thinking in the organization as people use the metaphor to redefine their working relationships. Fourth, the sports metaphor is a nonthreatening (and fun) way to look at the organization. Using this kind of open dialogue allows some tough truths to surface in a healthy manner.

There are obvious similarities between work and sports. Both activities involve rules or boundaries that must be observed. Team sports, like work, requires an understanding of who will do what and when they will do it. Team sports and the workplace both have a roster of “players” who exercise certain skills as well as “others,” such as owners, referees, the media, and the spectators, who also have a stake in the performance outcome. The sports team’s performance is recorded and analyzed for improvement opportunities, just as the performance of work teams can be recorded and analyzed for continuous improvement.

Planning a Reflective Practice Session

Most organized activities that are designed to improve the function of a group fall under the heading of “team building,” which includes a wide range of practices. The intent is usually to improve communications and interpersonal relations within the group, and it often focuses on activities that encourage reflective thinking among the team members to assess the group’s performance and identify issues that the group needs to address.

Unfortunately, when people talk about having a team-building session, many odd images may be conjured up. Surely it might be time to stoke up the fires, spread out hot coals for the group to walk on, and perform the tribal dance. And there are activities that fall under the rubric of teambuilding that might actually do these things.

However, a reflective practice session is simply a conversation that engages participants in examining their organization through the use of a metaphor. How would we describe our organization if it were a circus, a zoo, or a team involved in sports? This methodology ties in closely with the information on synergy advanced by William Gordon and his colleagues at Harvard, covered in the material on innovation on this web site.

  In order to prepare and conduct this type of reflective practice session, the facilitator and manager of the work group must first determine what sports metaphor really fits their organization. For example, most factory environments can identify with the football metaphor, with the production group as the offensive line and human resources, environmental, health and safety as playing on defense. Organizations that provide a staff function, on the other hand, tend to fit well with the basketball metaphor since in staff groups, the ball is often moved around to set up a successful play. In some very large organizations, there are people who are in the same organization who do the same work, but they are distributed over a wide area, such as the public affairs officers or human resources officers at various factories in a company.  They do not see each other on a regular basis, but they are all doing the same type of work. In their case, the game of golf might make an appropriate metaphor. Some work groups have people in the same department, but they all have very different tasks. When success depends on different people doing different things with minimal interaction, the track and field setting can provide an excellent metaphor to encourage reflective practice.

Care needs to go into the planning of a reflective practice session to ensure that all of the vital participants will be able to be present in an uninterrupted time and location. The facilitator prepares an appropriate list of questions ahead of time that will guide the discussion. For a reflective practice session using football as a metaphor, the facilitator might have the following questions prepared:

  1. How is our organization similar to a football team?

  2. If we are like a football team, what position does each of us play? Who plays offense and who plays defense? Do we have any special teams? Who is the quarterback? Does everyone really know what position he is supposed to play?

  3. If our organization were a football team, what would be our own version of clipping? Of intentional downing? Of un-sportsman like conduct? Of holding? Of face masking? What would be our definition of a touchdown?

  4. If our organization were a football team, let’s consider the “game film.” What are three examples of excellent plays we have run that achieved major yardage or a touchdown? What did we do that caused us to be successful?

  5. What are three examples of plays where we have been thrown for a loss, fumbled the ball, or suffered interceptions? Why did they occur and what do we need to do to keep this from happening in the future?

The use of a metaphor allows people to talk about issues that might not be easily discussed, but when they approach these issues from the perspective on what needs to be done differently in order to win, people are more willing to examine how they are running their plays. Reviewing the game film allows team members to express positive observations about the group that may have gone unstated, and it encourages participants to confront their problems in a setting in which everyone is committed to making the team a success.

 Why Use Reflective Practice?

People in organizations become complacent about issues in their culture that are unhealthy or dysfunctional. People may have become lax about reporting problems or may be reluctant to offer suggestions for improvement. There may be a systemic problem with the manner in which people communicate or confusion over the roles that people are expected to play. The reflective practice exercises that employ sports as a metaphor give people a relatively safe opportunity to surface the issues that need to be discussed.

Reflective practice creates a sudden and often unexpected opportunity for people to express their feelings about issues that often go unaddressed. Instead of denying that problems exist, concerns are brought to the surface in a reasonable manner within the established framework of the metaphor.

Using Art for Reflective Practice

Using a structured conversation around a metaphor is not the only form of reflective practice that can be employed to help a work group assess their situation and identify issues that need attention. The Highlander Education Center in east Tennessee has taught an approach for using art to stimulate reflective thinking that has been used in a wide variety of settings. This approach is based on some innovative thinking about how people use imagery and art to express their experiences. (5)

The technique is to gather participants in groups of three to six people around a large blank sheet of flipchart paper. Given a set of colored markers, the people are asked to work together to draw a picture that describes what their organization is like. People jump into the task and before long, they have produced an image that provides a critical look at the way things are.

One group at an American university in the western United States did this exercise and came up with a picture of themselves riding on a train, with cowboys trying to rob the train, Indians shooting arrows at them, and the track about to run out. That is how they described their institution, and they were able to articulate who the cowboys and Indians in the sketch represented.

At a factory in the Midwest, supervisors working in a group drew an image of a factory being devastated by a tornado labeled “upper management” with all of the employees running for cover. They were suffering from poorly planned changes that were being poorly implemented.

Using art as an approach to reflective practice is a lot more unpredictable than organizing a structured discussion around a metaphor. Groups can create images that may be quite shocking, unleashing pent up feelings about how things are going in their organization. Facilitators need to use this approach with care.

*Materials are drawn from Managing in a Team Environment. Quorum Books, 1998.

(1) Jack Mezirow. Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. Jossey-Bass, 1990.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Victoria Marsick. “Action Learning and Reflection in the Workplace” in Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. Jossey-Bass, 1990.

(4) John R. Dew and Jane Johnson. “What Game Is Your Team Playing?” Quality Progress, April, 1997.

(5) Deborah Barndt. Wild Fire: Art As Activism. Summach Press, 2006.