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October 2005
Dr. Clue Teambuilding Newsletter, Volume 3, Issue 5
The Dr. Clue Newsletter is sent only to subscribers. We do not share names with anyone else. To receive your free subscription or to unsubscribe, email to drclue@drclue.com Dr. Clue: Solving the Puzzles of Teamwork
Welcome again to the Dr. Clue Teambuilding Newsletter Like so many others, I am deeply saddened by Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. New Orleans is not only one of Dr. Clue's most popular hunt locations, it's also one of my own personal favorite cities anywhere (and I've been to over 30 countries). When creating a treasure hunt, you get to know a city and its people in a very "detailed" way. During my 15-20 visits to New Orleans, I've continually been delighted by its history, its restaurants, its musicŠall the small touches you see in shop windows and on buildings, down back alleys, on eatery walls, on bar ceilings, etc. It's hard for me to believe that so much of New Orleans has been destroyed, that so many people have lost their homes, their livelihoods, and their lives. During this time of crisis, we urge all of you to donate to the Red Cross (click here to find out how). As we saw in Southeast Asia after the tsunami, one of the best ways to help an area's recovery is by bringing back your business and re-injecting the local economy with your tourist dollars. So, when New Orleans is ready to open its doors again, by all means go! Although Dr. Clue's French Quarter treasure hunt is suspended for the moment, we plan on being one of the first businesses to return to the Big Easy! Here is a personal story from New Orleans, sent in by Dr. Clue facilitator, Emi Gittleman. Consider participating in this remarkable "team" effort: "To my extended family and community: I have some dear friends from New Orleans who, like so many, have lost everything. Yet, they remain hopeful and strong-spirited. My family and I have decided to adopt my friend Jamilah Peters-Muhammed, the three grandkids she raises & her extended family of 38 people so we can offer direct relief to someone I have a close relationship with. I am speaking with her regularly at her temporary hotel shelter & weekly, I send UPS packages with money orders and other gift card donations for as long as necessary. We have a very touching momentum happening with people's generosity of spirit and support. Jamilah is an extraordinary and selfless woman who I met years ago when I began doing multicultural education and outreach programs in New Orleans. She is a true Mama within the New Orleans community: a nurse, African Music and Dance teacher with kids, an HIV/AIDS counselor and a tireless volunteer with the schools, churches and birthing centers. She is featured in a wonderful book coming out by a friend of mine in September called "A Day in the Life of Extraordinary Woman." Believe it or not - Jamilah has already started an exercise and meditation class at her shelter and is doing tireless things for her community and family, even though she has health ailments and is fighting cancer. They are being housed until Oct 26th at a local hotel with 300 other survivors in the tiny town of St. Francisville, one hour North of Baton Rouge. I spoke to the Red Cross & they said they will not be reaching this small town. They are being fed, clothed and schooled thanks to the kindness of the churches and local citizens & FEMA is just getting there in small, limited steps. If you are able and willing to join me in the "adoption" - any contribution will make a difference when we put it together collectively. Feel free to pass this along. We have a special account set up for her. "Emi Gittleman c/o Jamilah Fund." Here is a list of specific things they need:
You can send inquiries, gift cards and donations to me: Emi Gittleman: 27 W. 55th Street, Suite 93, NYC, NY 10019. In peace, Emi Gittleman." We've got a great newsletter for you this month, including a fun and many-storied icebreaker, a fascinating article about virtual teams, and another stimulating puzzle. Enjoy!
Dave Blum
Set Up: Provide each participant with paper (preferably large easel-chart paper) and markers. Process: Each participant is told that they will be creating the story of their life, as follows: Take a piece of paper and fold it in half, and then in half again, to form a book. Choose the title of a popular song for the name of your book. Write that title on the front cover. On the inside cover (page 2), list a table of contents that includes:
Discussion Questions: What was most fun about this activity? What was most challenging? What did you learn about yourself from the choices that you made? What did you learn about others that impressed or surprised you? If you were to write a "sequel", what other information might you provide for people to really get to know you? The Point: Like many activities of this sort, "Story Of My Life" is primarily about introducing yourself to others in a fun and creative way. It allows people to use both their intellectual and their kinesthetic abilities, with free license to let their creativity run wild. This kind of sharing – where we allow ourselves be vulnerable and "transparent" to others – can go a long way towards starting the process of trust-building, so important to team development. (Thanks for this one to Business Training Works)
r. Clue is the premier designer of corporate teambuilding treasure hunts, nationwide. We begin with the cool museum or historical neighborhood of your choice, convenient to your office or conference locale. We then bring the area alive by scouting out its hidden treasures; its statues, plaques, murals, and monuments. To reach each secret location, you and your team will need to solve our challenging, da Vinci Code-like set of codes, puzzles and ciphers. Along the trail, we'll coach you on the steps successful business teams take on their road to high performance levels.
What is a virtual team? A virtual team has been defined as "a group of individuals who work across time, space, and organizational boundaries" and who "primarily interact electronically" (Stohr & Peterson 2000; Gould 2004). It may be as simple as a work team made up of you and your colleagues whose offices are in various buildings on your corporate campus; or it may be as complicated as a multilingual team with members in a dozen different countries. Companies use virtual teams for a variety of reasons:
Bill Snyder, a business writer, says that "as business expands and diversifies, and supply chains routinely span the globe, more and more managers are required to build and run teams whose members rarely work face to face – whether they are prepared [to] or not" (2003). Nearly 70% of businesses use virtual teams (Stohr & Peterson 2000). Organizations in every industry across the board employ virtual teams, and they are starting to discover that training tailored to these teams' particular needs is a necessity. What issues do virtual teams have that co-located teams don't? Assimilation and socialization are more challenging on virtual teams. Co-located teams have the luxury of interacting face-to-face, which smoothes the way when there are frequent changes to the team's project or membership. Virtual teams don't have that luxury, and confront the additional challenge of dealing with a more frequently-changing membership: Training analyst Velda Stohr and her co-author Stevie Peterson write that virtual team members "are required to have superior team participation skills; team membership is fluid requiring team members who can quickly assimilate into the team... Virtual teams will be expected to repeatedly change membership without losing productivity; little time will be available for team members to learn how to work together... Employees will have to learn to join teams and accept new member without the benefit of time-related socialization. Norms and role expectations must be expressed explicitly to new members, who must quickly acculturate" (2000:OV 4). In other words, on virtual teams there is a greater need for a resilience to change; roles, tasks, and even membership are more dynamic than on co-located teams. Virtual teams are more likely to experience cultural misunderstandings. Many virtual teams are also multicultural teams, spanning two or more countries that have their own unique cultural attributes. Snyder (2003) writes that managing such teams "takes tact, cultural sensitivity, and creativity." Non-native English-speaking employees may not find it as easy to communicate with native English-speaking colleagues, and the group doesn't get their full participation, ideas, and input during conference calls. There may also be more subtle cultural misunderstandings; Snyder interviewed a manager whose Israeli employees couldn't understand why their American counterparts seemed offended by their straightforward email messages. The manager figured out (with a little consulting assistance) that culturally, the Israelis were more blunt-spoken than Americans and this was the source of the friction. Understanding each other's culturally different communication styles allowed the team to move past this conflict. Conflict is a more complicated issue for virtual teams. Professor Margaret Neale of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, who studies and teaches about collaboration and negotiations, describes the three categories of conflict: Relationship (interpersonal/personality differences), task (different ideas about the work at hand), and process (differences about how to do the work). While she identifies task and process conflict as useful, even essential, to a successful team – allowing them to share and generate new ideas – she says that "virtual teams have a much more difficult time distinguishing the conflict of ideas in their virtual environment from the conflict of personal relationships" (as quoted in Snyder 2003). That is, because of the virtual nature of such teams, it's harder for team members to tell when conflict is simply about task, and they may mis-attribute it to relationship conflict instead. Neale told her interviewer that the antidote to this issue is trust: "The more team members trust each other, the less likely they are to mistake the battle of the idea for the battle of the ego" (Snyder 2003). (She also indicated that virtual teams have greater process conflict than co-located teams, meaning that they spend more time working out how to accomplish their tasks – which, as you'll see later, may actually be necessary for a successful virtual team.) Trust is even more important for virtual teams than co-located teams, but is harder to establish. Trust is more likely to be established – or NOT established – at the very start, when a virtual team first coalesces. Stohr & Peterson write that "first interactions of team members are crucial [and] ... appear to set the tone for how members will relate throughout an entire project" (2000:TB 1). Teams establish trust at their inception in part simply by having members get to know each other. Dr. David Gould, a leadership researcher and now chair of the University of Phoenix's graduate business program, interviewed the members of 13 virtual teams to understand the special challenges they confront. Many emphasized the necessity of face-to-face meetings, with one summarizing the import in this way: "Face-to-face is VERY important. You yell at the girl from Bell when your phone bill is messed up, not because she is responsible, but because you do not know her face. Once you have met, you have more compassion and understanding for your fellow team members" (Gould 1997:Ch. 5). Virtual teams are at a disadvantage in trust-building compared to co-located teams, since virtual teammates are much less likely to meet in person. Virtual teams use new and sometimes unfamiliar technologies that, ironically, may make teamwork harder. Management consultants Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith (2001) believe that the technology that virtual teams often use ("groupware") "is strongly biased against teaming in a number of critical ways." Some of the problems they've identified are:
Virtual teams have an increased need to be able to identify and use a cooperative approach. Stohr and Peterson note "the emergence of environments which require inter-organizational cooperation as well as competition" (2000:OV 1). In other words, doing business with virtual teams means the increased need for a collaborative approach, not just the straightforward competitive approach that was the product of an easier time and a less-global economy. Related to the previous point, Katzenbach & Smith (2001) write that "most virtual-team efforts ... are too easily enticed by technology and lulled into ignoring critical differences between single-leader [hierarchical] and team [collaborative]" approaches. They say teams are too likely to just want to get on with it rather than considering how and when to take each approach. They warn that, combined with the unrestrained embrace of groupware technologies, this often results in "continual miscommunications, data overload, and analysis paralysis. We let in too many participants, who know too little about their roles and jobs, and growing distrust results" (2001). Needs of Virtual Teams that are Different from the Needs of Co-Located Teams>/span>
How can teambuilding programs help address the special issues of virtual teams?
Business journalist Mike Dempster interviewed Darleen DeRosa, an organizational consultant who recently conducted a study on global virtual teams. She found that "while organizations have invested heavily in virtual teams as well as expensive support technology, many miss the big picture... 'It's amazing ... how many companies do not pay attention to supporting virtual teamwork to make sure the team is really productive.'" (as quoted in Dempster 2005). Of the 21 virtual teams she studied, an astonishing "65% of team members said they'd never had an effective team-building session; 36% had never met their team members face-to-face." DeRosa also found that "virtual teams that invest in team building perform better than those that don't" (Dempster 2005). Perhaps that seems obvious. However, Neale indicated to Snyder 2003) that many companies aren't yet aware of the special issues that virtual teams have and how to help them succeed. Here's what virtual teams can get out of team-building training tailored to their needs: Practicing the special skills a virtual team requires. A team-building program where teams actually get to practice resilience by taking on various roles throughout the program, experiencing changes in team membership or having to enter an established team and get up to speed – all these elements allow team members to sharpen their team participation skills. By participating in team-based activities that are tailored to the fluid virtual team environment, team members can learn – by experience – how better to handle the inevitable, frequent changes they confront when on a distributed team. Building trust. Neale emphasizes that "successful managers of virtual teams build trust with face-to-face contact," even though arranging for face-to-face meetings can be costly (as quoted in Snyder 2003). Snyder also interviewed Hewlett-Packard manager John Monroe, whose dispersed multilingual project team had members in 16 countries and on both sides of the International Date Line; Monroe agrees that "there's no substitute... Driving travel costs to zero is a false economy" (2003). Team-building goes hand-in-hand with trust-building – participants in a team-building program have a chance to interact face-to-face outside the office environment. For virtual teams this is even more important, as they may not have a chance to interact in person otherwise. In her research, DeRosa found that "virtual teams that meet once or twice a year perform better overall than those that don't" (in Dempster 2005). Handling conflict. When virtual teams are multicultural, getting to know each other face-to-face has the added benefit of heading off (or ameliorating) cultural misunderstandings. In addition, team-building that includes a personality inventory or communication-styles component will especially aid virtual teams. This is because, as you might recall, virtual teams can have more trouble than co-located teams with identifying or separating relationship conflict (interpersonal differences) from task conflict (disagreements about ideas). Insight into style differences helps team members understand whether a disagreement is task or relationship-based and respond more appropriately. A team-building program that emphasizes experiential learning gives teams a chance to work on streamlining the negotiation of process conflict – exercise that they can apply immediately when they get back to their offices. Task approach choices: Learning how and when to collaborate versus work independently. Katzenbach & Smith (2001) write that the key to a virtual team's success is "not technological proficiency [but rather] how the members differentiated between two critical situations: individual tasks and goals that members could achieve under clear single-leader direction, and critical collective work that demanded real-time collaboration, multiple leadership, and the disciplined behavior of a real team." A team-building program that's based on problem-solving and goal attainment within and among teams will allow participants to practice determining how to allocate tasks and how to work – together or independently, as they deem appropriate – towards team and group goals. Actually experiencing the results of their decisions about collaboration and single-leader direction in a real-time simulation helps team members learn how to make such decisions in their virtual team environment. In reviewing her findings about virtual teams and training, DeRosa particularly mentioned that although "companies make great efforts around team building with traditional teams,... they didn't think enough about virtual groups and their challenges." She said that companies "need to realize that making an investment in the [virtual] team will increase productivity" (Dempster 2005). Virtual groups can be as successful as those that are co-located; they just need the right kind of support – and that includes teambuilding tailored to the special needs of virtual teams. Ten Factors for A Virtual Team's Success
References
Dempster, Mike. 2005. "Team-building Key for Virtual Workplace", Business Edge 5 (27) (July 21, 2005). Accessed September 2005 at Business Edge, http://www.businessedge.ca/article.cfm/newsID/10076.cfm.
Gould, David. 1997. "Leadership in Virtual Teams." Doctoral dissertation, Seattle University. Accessed September 2005 at UMI (University Microfilms) ProQuest Digital Dissertations database, http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/gateway; portions at Gould's website, Virtual Organization, http://www.seanet.com/~daveg/articles.htm.
Gould, David. 2004. "Virtual Teams." Accessed September 2005 at Virtual Organization, http://www.seanet.com/~daveg/vrteams.htm.
Katzenbach, Jon R. and Douglas K. Smith. 2001. "The Discipline of Virtual Teams", Leader to Leader, 22 (Fall 2001). Accessed September 2005 at Leader to Leader Institute, http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/l2l/fall2001/katzenbach.html.
Snyder, Bill. 2003. "Teams that Span Time Zones Face New Work Rules," Stanford Business Magazine, May 2003. Accessed September 2005 at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0305/feature_virtual_teams.shtml.
Stohr, Velda and Stevie Peterson. 2000. "Virtual Teams: A Toolkit for OD Practitioners, Leaders, and Team Members of Virtual Teams (March 2000)." Accessed September 2005 at the Free Management Library, http://www.managementhelp.org/grp_skll/virtual/virtual.htm.
About the author: Jennifer van Stelle has been writing (and participating in) treasure hunts for over 20 years. In addition to being part of the Dr. Clue creative team, Jen is currently a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, where she studies social networks, the venture capital industry, regional economies, and organizational sociology.
What does a teambuilding treasure hunt look, feel and sound like?
Answer to Last Issue's Puzzle In our last issue, we gave you a series of numbered boxes, corresponding to letters in the clues. The answers to the clues were as follows: Halloween; Airline; Emoticon; Mantra; Decathlon; Bewitched; Alliteration; Carnivorous; Kangaroo; Nepotism; Decatur; Workaholic; Persephone; Angkor. The secret message, when you read down from left to right, was a quote by Helen Keller: "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." DR. CLUE HONOR ROLL This month's sole puzzle solver was Michele Jones of San Francisco.
Today's Puzzle Challenge To find the answers to the clue questions at the bottom of the page, you'll need to first pass the following pop quiz. Feel free to use the internet when needed to find the various answers.
As always, we'll list our Top Five fastest puzzle solvers in our Dr. Clue Honor Roll next issue Wondering how a typical Treasure Hunt CLUE works? Click here. to follow along with one.
Since then, we've added four more treasure hunt venues:
Our clients, from Oracle to Yahoo, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Apple, and Wells Fargo all agree that Dr. Clue is cutting-edge teambuilding.
We'd love to hear your comments about the newsletter. Love it? Hate it? Things you'd like to see? We welcome your feedbackŠand your contributions! And remember: If you liked this newsletter, please forward it to a friend or a colleague. Information is meant to be shared! Watch for the next edition of the Dr. Clue Teambuilding Newsletter in December.
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Dr. Clue Treasure Hunts
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