A Large Bank Wanted to Develop a More Team-Focused Culture

Essay

A large bank wanted to develop a more team-focused culture, so it put all departments and branches through a series of three-day team building sessions. These expensive sessions represented a combination of wilderness-based trust-building (such as trust falls and leaderless problem solving) and sessions in which employees revealed their personal experiences and problems. Six months after the workforce had completed this training, the bank discovered that most departments and branches operated very much as they had before the team building program. There was little team culture and employees worked together with varying degrees of proficiency. Moreover, several employees had left the firm because they were upset about revealing their personal lives to colleagues. Identify two types of team building problems that would explain the general failure of this team building intervention.