Servant-Leader Books In Review

Building Team Spirit: Activities for Inspiring and Energizing Teams
By Barry Heerman, McGraw-Hill, 1997, 393 pages. $40 (plus $6 shipping and handling)
Reviewed by Richard W. Smith, senior Educator

During the past thirty years I have had the opportunity to explore many, "activity books." These have ranged in focus from self-help books to team building books. Almost all of the business books were doing-based and focused on the external and "training". Building Team Spirit invites, challenges, and even requires the reader to enter into being-based work - inner work, developmental work, learning rather than training. As such, it resonates powerfully with me and with the concepts of servant-leadership, which is also an invitation to being-based work.

Building Team Spirit is concerned with both well traveled and less traveled roads. For example, the Personal Pathways activity on page 59 employs the common tool of story-telling to open up our less traveled paths of who we are and who we are becoming as "spirited individuals." The beauty of this activity - and many others in the book - lies in the choice I have as I respond to the invitation to search, explore experiment, experience. That is, I can choose to stay at the "training level" or I can choose to enter into a deeper "learning level" and no matter which I choose I can accept the invitation and gain from the experience. The other interesting thing about many of these activities is that "we" -as a team- are offered the same invitation and we can also choose to explore at the "training level" or the "learning level."

The structure of the book and the activities also gives us choice. We can follow the structure and adhere to the time guidelines and have a transforming experience - both as individuals and as a team, or we can choose to leave the path of time - control as set and use a particular activity to go broader and/or deeper in our exploration and learning - a team could spend an entire day with one of these activities and keep layering, exploring, framing questions, and searching with may foci. Interestingly enough, in order to move onto this path a team would have to let go of its own need to be controlled by the boundaries set by the activity.

The paths - phases of the Team Spirit Spiral - are well-introduced and hence the activities are experienced as connected to a particular phase of the spiral. There are six phases to the spiral: Initiating, Visioning, Claiming, Celebrating, Letting Go, and Service. - each phase travels through and connects all the other phases. Because Team Spirit is a holistic way of being/becoming a high performing team there are many cross references to other phases of the spiral within the work of any one phase. Another way that Team Spirit is experienced as holistic lies in how the major foundation/theoretical pieces are interconnected - reading about the people who have influenced the concept of team Spirit is itself worth the price of the trip - as are the appendices. I was especially hooked by The Spirit of the Facilitator as it also calls on the facilitator to become more than just another "trainer".

Over the years I have found that a challenge for all teams - whether working with a written guide or not - is "how do we follow through?" A tendency for teams to get caught up in the moment, have lots of energy and passion and then - the team returns to its familiar, if not comfortable, path. The activities in this book invite and challenge the team to develop into a spirited team, those teams that accept this challenge find that the transformation actually occurs. I have personally experienced this transformation so I know it does happen.

If you are working with a group and you want to become part of a high performing spirited team then Building Team Spirit is a book that will help you focus and stay the course so that the transformation you are seeking will actually have a chance of occurring. This book is not magic - although I have found some of the activities to be magical - it is an invitation to take a path that is transformative. If you choose this path it will, indeed, make all the difference for you, for your team members, and for your team.