Tag Archives: team

Professionals

5 Team Building Exercises

Teamwork: team working together.

Five main categories of team building exercises exist. They consist of activities that build communication, promote problem solving and decision making, encourage adaptability and the ability to plan, work to build trust, and develop a cooperative spirit. The team building exercises that promote these various skills are meant to be enjoyable and instructional.

Depending on what you want to improve on your team, you can try some of the following activities:

1. Build communication. Activities that develop open lines of communication and listening increase communication. Try games like telephone, where you sit in a circle and one person whispers a scenario into the ear of the next person, such as how an important report was not delivered to the president in time. The “telephone” chain continues until the last person, who announces what he or she heard. Generally, by the end of the chain the story has been altered substantially. This gives employees a chance to discuss how the story changed along the way and methods they could use in the future to improve communication.

2. Promote problem solving and decision making. Used often in science fairs, the egg drop is a particularly effective activity for promoting problem solving. Split the employees into two groups and have them rig up a package that ensures a raw egg doesn’t break when dropped from a distance. Make it more challenging by timing them and limiting the types of materials they can use to protect the egg.

3. Encourage adaptability and planning. Survival scenarios work well to encourage planning and adaptability. Announce a survival situation, such as the fact that everyone will be deserted on an island indefinitely. Instruct the group to come up with a list of 15 items they must bring with them in order to ensure their survival. The process of choosing will require that they adapt and plan for the unexpected.

4. Build trust. One of the most efficient ways to test the trust between two individuals is to have them protect one another physically. This can be done by having one person close his or her eyes and fall backward into the arms of another. Or, you could have employees stand facing each other in pairs; with their elbows bent, they place their palms together, leaning toward each other and moving their feet back further and further until they’re supporting each other. Such exercises quickly highlight trust issues and help everyone learn to believe in one another.

5. Nurture a cooperative spirit. Assigning employee teams to volunteer with charitable causes is the best way to encourage cooperation. When people work on a cause that the team cares about, they will bond. The opportunity to give back to those less fortunate often creates a charitable, cooperative attitude among everyone involved.

Armed with these ideas for team building exercises, you can create the best working culture for your business.

Professionals

5 Ways to Make Your Team More Brilliant

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Every leader wants employees with great ideas. But great ideas don’t just appear in a vacuum. They tend to come most readily in environments where people feel intellectually stimulated, where deep thinking is valued and, most importantly, where people are given the time to think. Here are five ways you can nurture that environment in your company and among the people who report to you.

[tabs type=”vertical”][tabs_head][tab_title]Choose a video of the day[/tab_title][tab_title] Start a book club[/tab_title][tab_title]Schedule in creative team building[/tab_title][tab_title]Curate content[/tab_title][tab_title]Take a MOOC together[/tab_title][/tabs_head][tab]When Sal Khan started posting his videos years ago at KhanAcademy.org, he only covered math topics. But now Khan Academy features everything from physics to economics to art history. Send around a selection of a favorite video each day and bring up what you learned in conversations. Even writing a fact from a video on the white board before meeting starts will send the message that it’s OK to spend time stretching your brain. [/tab][tab]You can access classic works of literature in bite-size chunks via DailyLit (which emails a passage every day from books like The Odyssey or Moby Dick). Host once-a-month lunchtime discussions until you make your way through. Or you can buy a more current book for everyone and have the author call in during a lunchtime discussion. You may be surprised how many authors are willing to do this! [/tab][tab]Yes, you’re busy. Yes, everyone has a lot of work to do. But the work will still be there if you have an art teacher come in with paints and canvases for a 90-minute workshop. It will still be there if you all go do a session at a local pottery studio or learn how to make fabulous pastries at a commercial kitchen that does classes. When people get away from their inboxes for a while, they get a ton of ideas, and doing team building during the workday scores points from people who feel like they don’t see their families enough anyway.[/tab][tab]This takes some effort, as people get a lot of emails and tend to delete most newsletters they receive. But if your links to articles and reports are relevant and interesting (be sure to put the highlights in the email and interrupt an intriguing sentence with a “…” to get people to click), you can get your team in the habit of reading them. This is especially true if you devote 5 minutes at the start of any staff meetings or calls to discussing them.[/tab][tab]Massive open online courses (MOOCs) let people around the world hear from top professors and work through assignments, just like you would at that university. Coursera.org, for instance, features free courses taught by professors from Princeton, the University of Michigan, Duke University and other places, and covers topics from robotics to world history. MOOCs tend to have a high dropout rate, but if you take a course as a team, you’ll be accountable to each other.[/tab][/tabs]