On 1 August Learning Pool turned 5 years old.  5 years is a significant milestone for any company and certainly time to take stock and work out what happens next.  We decided to spend 3 days together as a team in order to celebrate, have some informal time together (although Learning Pool is far from formal at the best of times) but also to revisit our plans and discuss our options as a group.

This photo of Paul & me with our team was taken on Derry’s new Peace Bridge last week – just before we split into 6 teams and scrambled all over the City on a fun treasure hunt.  We’re very proud of our team.  I doubt it’s possible to grow a sizeable team any quicker than 5 years, no matter how many management books you read or how impatient you are.  It’s like growing a harmonious flower bed or baking good bread.  There’s a method & stages to go through but at the end of the day, it takes a certain amount of time.

People have to form relationships & become comfortable with each other before they can perform well at anything.  It’s difficult to do this when the organisation is growing fast as there are new people joining the team all the time & “upsetting” the dynamic.  Everyone knows the Tuckman model of team formation and the 4 stages – forming, storming, norming, performing.  It can be hard to get onto those later stages when there is a constant influx of new team members.

When I look at the photo, 18 people or about one third of our team have been with us less than 12 months; 16 have been with us for over 3 years and the remaining 23 have been at Learning Pool between one & three years.  I often think about the Belbin exercise our team completed at our first team building event on Lusty Beg island in December 2008 when the company was just over 2 years old.  We had no co-ordinators & no implementers.  We had 2 completer finishers (fortunately!), one team worker, 2 plants and a solitary monitor-evaluator.  The remaining 24 people were crammed onto the resource investigator & shaper spaces – 12 apiece.  Things have changed since then, although some days I miss that early chaos.

My question to you all in this blog is how do other companies build on the success of team building days & keep the momentum going once your dispersed teams have dispersed again.  How do you keep that energy & focus going once everyone has waved goodbye and gone back to their day jobs?