I've taken my team to the bar numerous times after an especially tough week or after the closure of an especially tough project. It's fun to blow off steam with the group: you just have to make sure it's a group. Dinner and a couple of Happy Hour cocktails can go a long way towards building camaraderie.
That's not the only team-building thing we do, of course. I've got people who don't drink so we mix it up.
This is all getting fairly off topic but I'm oddly surprised at how rigid these responses have been. I think there's a big disconnnect and probably different feelings between industries.
After reading this thread some more the vocabulary being used is very telling. You and I call it a
team. The HR speak is
manager and
subordinate. You and I want to build relationships and comraderie, to use your term. They want to proactively restrict interaction to minimize risk. It's fucking bizarre to me.
My team has grown organically and is built on trust and relationships. New team members are afforded all the opportunities the existing team members have. If I'm going to go have dinner after a long week on the road with a male I'm sure as hell going to do it with a female as well. If someone is uncomfortable with me asking them to dinner then that's on them, I'm not treating them any differently. I can see why they might be uncomfortable, but getting over that hurdle and becoming comfortable with each other is more important to me than some initial awkwardness. If someone repeatedly ostracizes themselves from team gatherings they aren't as likely to work well on my team. But I'm not automatically dismissing anyone, if they are a good team member and technically sound I'm not going to ding them for not going out, that's ridiculous. But I'm not going to stop inviting people out altogether because that's not how I've built some of the more successful teams in my organization. We bond and grow and trust. Without that you've got a dysfunctional team IMO.
We're not this robotic organization built explicitly to minimize risk, that sounds awful.