Team Building

This Breakfast Club presentation is brought to you by Sesame Street! Just kidding… it’s not. But this week’s theme, team building, was inspired by Sesame Street’s “Cooperation Makes it Happen” song.

At adHOME, we’re all team players. We work synergistically. We each bring something unique to the table- whether it’s skills in rebranding, design, copywriting, translation, content creation for social mediadigital marketing, web development, client relations and/or project management or creative direction; it takes all kinds of skills to create an awesome campaign.

The hierarchy here at adHOME would be considered flat by most standards. Our brainstorming sessions don’t get monopolized by the Partners. Mark and Mary-Ellen are known for asking everyone at the table for their input in group brainstorming sessions.

Naturally, to figure out the best practices in team building, we looked to Google. Google’s Project Aristotle was launched to uncover the absolute best practices for team building. To do so, Google analyzed two types of teams:

In team A, meetings are led by an executive, interruptions and tangents are not tolerated and the meeting’s agenda is adhered to strictly. Once the meeting is over, every one goes back to their desks and gets straight to work on the tasks that were delegated to them in the meeting.

In team B, meetings may start a little late while people chat about the latest Game of Thrones episode. During the meeting, everyone from junior employees to senior executives get their chance to talk and provide their expertise. Decisions are made collectively. Once the meeting ends, team members may linger at the table a little to discuss their weekend plans.

While Team A may initially come across as the most efficient of the two groups, Team B’s outcomes were found to be significantly better. The reasoning behind this is that, when everyone works together in a complimentary fashion, a synergy is formed.  This means that the final result is inexplicably greater than the sum of all the individual contributions. There are countless examples of this in real life, including in sports, where sometimes the best teams don’t have any superstars  but they’ve just got a winning combination of players that play well together.

Project Aristotle also found that successful teams have two things in common:

  1. Conversational Turn Taking – teams do better when everyone gets to talk
  2. High Average Social Sensitivity – teams do better when team members mutually empathetic and respectful of each other

Teams that can correctly identify the emotion displayed by the following images of eyes are said to work well together:

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Answers: Top Left: Panicked/ Top Right: Preoccupied/ Bottom Left: Upset/ Bottom Right: Playful

Unsurprisingly, adHOMErs aced this test pretty easily. We’re very much in tune with each other and we love working together. I have no doubt that, while we haven’t tried it yet, we’d be awesome at doing an Escape Room, the latest trend in both fun nights out with friends and corporate team building.

This Breakfast Club presentation has got us wondering what kind of challenges will be in store for our next Home Skooled Session on Team Building on Thursday. Only one thing is certain; cooperation makes it happen.