The Rugby World Cup brings us a fine example of how not to lead and how a team can be successful despite its leader. Leadership has to exist at every level within a team if that team is going to perform consistently well. Leadership will influence and inspire team members to ever greater deeds. But leadership is about ownership and responsibility as well as empathy and understanding

Imanol Harinordoquy summed it up when he said the French team ignored coach Marc Lievremont at the World Cup because he was “lost”. After Lievremont called some of his squad ” spoiled brats” because they went against his instructions not to celebrate their Welsh victory.

“He was lost, I will not miss him,” said number eight Harinordoquy. ”It was our adventure. It was meant to be the nice experience of 30 men. We had to free ourselves from his supervision. He cast the stone at us too often. When something goes wrong, we’re all in the same boat. There are no good or bad guys.”

Great teamwork requires leadership to be inclusive rather than autocratic, developing a feeling of us rather than me and them. To do that trust has to be earned on both sides. Trust is earned more easily during testing, difficult and fallow times than it is when things are easy. Just look at the UK’s national cohesion delivered by Hitler through the Second World War. Trust is hard earned but can be lost very quickly if empathy and understanding are missing.

The human phenomenon that is the catalyst of trust is effective communication.  Effective communication is open honest and not in any way ambiguous. And communication is about the effect on the receiver rather than the intended message of the sender. So again Empathy and understanding of the receiver’s position is key to effective communication.

Teams are made up of individuals who are entrusted by the team to carry out the roles and duties they are responsible for. So individual responsibility for performance is vital to performance, yet there is also a corporate responsibility held by the team. This is particularly so in professional sport where fan bases and even nations are watching expectantly. Professional sportsmen are no different from businessmen in terms of responsibility. It is here where modern society has a good deal to answer for in terms of allowing the derogation of responsibility. Responsibility is about accepting blame and accepting feedback and using both to foster improvement; all too often responsibility is offloaded like a hospital pass to the nearest source of external influence attributable to the action or behaviour. Externalising protects the weak but also prevents individuals from the identification and self realisation of the key areas requiring development. Sportsmen need to shoulder both individual and corporate responsibility.

Sports teams must be held accountable for all their results, not just the good ones. Sir Clive Woodward is a fine example of someone who built a team around him to deliver success and in that delivery every individual knew their role and owned their individual and the corporate result good or bad. An outstanding team is results oriented and every individual owns their contribution to that performance and owns the whole performance; leaders just as much as any other direct contributor. For that to happen leaders need not blame and carry out retribution but instead they need to honestly identify failure and weakness and coach and develop to influence improvement.

Leadership is all about ownership and responsibility wherever that leadership may be exercised. Self leadership through to corporate leadership entail responsibility and ownership.

How many team building days are no more than what can be at best described as a corporate day out? What is the tangible value or benefit of such events balanced against the corporate price tag and does it really matter anyway? Perhaps strange questions to ask given I have a vested interest in businesses and organisations continuing to invest in team building activities. Or perhaps not, may be just raising awareness of the difference and posing the questions in the context of the current economic situation.

Times are tough commercially and there has seldom been a time where getting as much performance as possible from all elements of a business has been so critical. We are in a time where efficiency and effectiveness are paramount to survival, let alone thriving. Without doubt, a cohesive team working together to achieve collective optimum performance yields the best possible results for an organisation; no matter the business sector or team concerned. Such levels of teamwork and organisational cohesion do not come without considered development and attention – it doesn’t happen by accident it happens by design.

Pat Lencioni’s ‘Five Dysfunctions of a Team’, namely; absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results, are a good place to start in assessing an activity in terms of team building or corporate day out. If the planned activity does not address the dysfunctions in some way it is unlikely to be truly a team building activity. That is to say, teambuilding activities should build trust, facilitate challenging dialogue and encourage commitment and accountability whilst being focused on achieving results. All eminently possible through practical team activities involving objective appraisal and constructive feedback delivered which can be fun and delivered in an unusual environment. Arguably, it would be extremely difficult to address the dysfunctions without using interactive methods and more or less practical activities.

Quad biking, karting, a day at the races, clay pigeon shooting, etc. all fun, practical activities which teams can participate; however, team building? I don’t think so. Committing to participate in a CSR team activity, team challenge day, team competition, team ‘survival skills’ exercise, etc. all generally ‘hit the spot’ in terms of team building. Interestingly enough, both sets of activities are all probably pretty much in the same ‘ball park’ in terms of cost. When all is said and done, it is just a question of what is the real aim of the ‘activity day’. After all, enjoying social, fun activities together brings benefits to the team too, but let’s not call them team building.