Thing Is, Managers Don’t Want You To Bond. They Want You To Do Tasks.

This is what a lot of “thought leadership” about the building of teams and communities gets wrong.

Here’s a good overall post from Substack about building teams and communities:

Building community isn't a mystery

The framework is there in that post, but when we get into supposedly using “data” regarding the building of teams, it starts to get sloppy. If you’ve ever read anything in this canon of team- and community-building, usually people will say, “Well, we need to make things fun for our people.” Here comes the ping pong trope, right? In the article above, the guy writing it (his name is Bruce) talks about some “viral LinkedIn post” (lol) about how someone used these Esther Perel cards pictured above to start conversations in the break room. OK. There are any number of problems with that, including:

• A lot of people don’t even use the break room, because they’re either remote, hybrid, or eat at their desk (or head to the bar for a four-beer lunch, baby!).