Why Traditional Team Building Doesn't Address Dysfunction

Three days offsite. Alliance mobilisation workshop. Professionally facilitated. Experiential activities designed to build trust. Breakout sessions exploring values alignment. Shared meals creating informal connection. Team charter co-created and signed by all parties. Everyone leaves energised, united, confident about partnership potential.

Three months later: working in functional silos, information hoarding, escalating disagreements through organisational hierarchies, pointing to contract clauses when interests diverge, maintaining defensive positions despite partnering agreement. The workshop was genuinely excellent. People enjoyed it. Facilitators were skilled. Activities well-designed. But morale improvement didn't translate to collaborative capability.

This pattern repeats across sectors. Harvard Business Review research on planning leadership offsites identifies crucial questions to ask: clarity on objectives, careful participant selection, defined outcome measures, structured follow-up mechanisms, experienced facilitator capability. This is valuable guidance for designing effective offsites. The research assumes, however, that an offsite is the appropriate intervention. The prior question - should team building address your specific collaboration challenge? - often goes unasked.

The distinction matters because team morale and collaborative capability are different things. Morale is how people feel about working together. Collaborative capability is whether they can actually work together effectively when complexity is high, pressure intense, interests misaligned, decisions urgent. Morale matters - unhappy teams struggle. But happy teams also struggle when they lack capability to surface conflict constructively, integrate across technical boundaries, make decisions amidst ambiguity, maintain partnership when individual incentives diverge.

Traditional team building addresses morale. It makes people feel better about each other. That's a valuable outcome. But its an insufficient outcome when the problem is systemic barriers to collaboration: misaligned incentives, capability gaps in constructive conflict management, governance mechanisms rewarding individual optimisation, information asymmetries creating competitive dynamics, structural impediments to joint decision-making.

Most organisations invest in team building without diagnosing why collaboration fails in their specific context. Standard workshop package deployed regardless of whether the problem is trust deficit, capability gap, structural impediment, governance dysfunction, or misaligned incentives. Like prescribing medication without examination - it might coincidentally address the problem, but it's more likely to waste resources whilst the actual issues persist.

Research from McKinsey on team building for the contemporary work environment emphasises evolving team structures, remote collaboration challenges, psychological safety foundations. Their analysis recognises that traditional approaches designed for co-located stable teams may not address distributed, dynamic, multi-organisational project structures. The complexity of major project teams - crossing organisational boundaries, technical specialisms, geographical locations, contractual relationships - requires more than social bonding exercises.

The Major Projects Association's Project Initiation Handbook emphasises communications and engagement as critical success factors. True. But the handbook focuses on what needs to happen, not diagnosing barriers preventing it. Effective communication and genuine engagement require specific capabilities, supportive structures, enabling governance. Workshop exercises building interpersonal connection don't necessarily develop those capabilities, address those structures, or reform that governance.

Consider alliance formation in infrastructure delivery. NEC contracts, partnering charters, collaborative procurement approaches all assume parties can collaborate effectively. But assumptions don't create capability. Offshore wind alliances bringing together developers, port authorities, supply chain partners require genuine integration across organisations with different cultures, competing interests, asymmetric power dynamics, contractual risk allocations that maintain adversarial positions despite partnering language.

A three-day mobilisation workshop can build personal relationships. That is an essential foundation. But it doesn't address the commercial director's bonus tied to individual organisation profit, the procurement process optimising for lowest cost rather than collaborative value, the governance structure escalating every disagreement to senior leadership, the information systems preventing transparent data sharing, the capability gaps in constructive conflict management when interests genuinely diverge.

Effective intervention requires understanding your specific context first. What prevents collaborative behaviour in your programme? Lack of trust between individuals? That's a morale issue - team building might help. Lack of capability in managing productive conflict? That's a skills gap - capability development needed. Misaligned incentives rewarding competitive behaviour? That's structural - requires governance reform. Information asymmetries creating defensive positioning? That's systemic - needs process redesign. Usually it's combination requiring integrated approach.

The organisations achieving genuine collaboration distinguish between building team morale, building collaborative capability, and addressing structural barriers. They recognise these as different challenges requiring different interventions. Team building workshops can improve morale. Collaborative capability requires sustained development: skills in constructive challenge, practice in joint decision-making under pressure, experience working through genuine interest conflicts. Structural barriers need governance redesign, incentive alignment, process reform, information transparency.

Diagnosis before intervention isn't complicated but it's frequently skipped. What specifically prevents collaborative behaviour in your context? Ask your team - they usually know. Ask them not in workshops designed to build morale, but in forums designed to surface uncomfortable truths. The answers won't be generic. They'll be specific to your governance, your incentives, your history, your commercial relationships, your capability gaps.

Then design intervention addressing those specific barriers. Sometimes that includes team building - when interpersonal relationships genuinely are the impediment. More often it requires an integrated approach: some capability development, some structural reform, some governance redesign, combined with team building to maintain relationships through the changes.

The alternative is the pattern too common in major projects: invest in workshop, generate enthusiasm, watch behaviours revert when operational pressure returns, schedule another workshop, repeat. The energy wasted maintaining this cycle is substantial. The opportunity cost is higher - resources spent on intervention that doesn't address root cause are resources not spent on intervention that might.

Team building has value. When teams lack connection, shared understanding, basic trust foundation, interventions building those help. But when collaboration fails despite good relationships, the problem isn't morale. It could be structural. It could be capability. It could be governance. It could be incentives. It requires  structured and detailed diagnosis to know.

Spending on team building without diagnosis is spending on any intervention without understanding the problem: occasionally lucky, usually wasteful, always risky.

When did you last diagnose why collaboration fails before investing in how to fix it?

References

Harvard Business Review (2025) "Planning an Offsite for Your Leadership Team? Ask These 5 Questions". Available at: https://hbr.org/2025/07/planning-an-offsite-for-your-leadership-team-ask-these-5-questions

McKinsey & Company "Team Building for a New Era". Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-guide-to-navigating-the-new-world-of-work/team-building-for-a-new-era

Major Projects Association (2017) Project Initiation Handbook: Ten Tenets of Major Project Initiation. Resources available to MPA members only.

NEC Contract (2025) Industry Transformation Research Report. Contract form alone doesn't create collaborative behaviour - must address underlying barriers. Available at: https://www.neccontract.com/industry-transformation-research-report