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If you are looking for some team building activities, you can follow this link to them.
To start of, I would like to clarify one thing first...no activity can build or motivate a team.
It’s how you use it. It’s a bit like your car. It can be a dangerous thing to have. Or it can be a safe way of getting from point A to point B. Or it can be totally useless if you are blind. It all depends on how you use it.
It’s the same with these activities. As isolated experiences, they mean absolutely nothing.
But if used in the correct way it has the ability to open people’s minds. It can show them the right way.
Or it can be very powerful in showing your team their destructive behavior.
If you use team building exercises in the right way, it is the most powerful tool to get that "AHA" moment through to people.
| If you use it as an isolated activity, it becomes more of an icebreaker game. These are also very powerful, but for something else. If you want a toolkit of free icebreaker games, here’s the link. |
Why are team building exercises so powerful? It's because they talk to people on all levels. It communicates on a physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual and social level. No other means of communication can do that.
Someone once said, "Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, but let me experience and I will truly understand."
So it’s the experiential nature of these team building exercises that makes them so powerful.
People use different ways to get their massage across to others. Most people use verbal and visual communication. Like giving a speech or to use pictures on a power point presentation. Team building exercises, along with other ways of communication adds a completely new dimension to your message.
The Right Way to Use Team Building Exercises
Use them only when you have a need to communicate something. The need to get the message across should come first. Not the other way around. If you decide to do an activity with the hope that it would "build" something or do some magical trick, you would probably be disappointed.
Decide on your message that you want to get across first and then choose the activity that would best simulate or suite that message. Don’t do the activity first and then decide on the message.
| Let me use an example. Do the following now. Fold your arms in front of your chest...yes do it, don’t just read on...actually do it. Now look at how your arms are folded and fold it the other way around. What does it mean to you? Maybe something. But it is pretty much meaningless without any context. Now, let’s assume that I want to bring the message across that most resistance to change is emotional and not rational...that you have to overcome the resistance to the discomfort (feeling) first before you can move on...etc, etc. I can carry on and on talking and writing about the subject...and the message might come across. But if I were to ask you to do the arm folding activity now and ask you how you felt when you fold your arms the other way around, it will be much more powerful. You would probably tell me that you felt uncomfortable. And that you felt as if you want to change back to the original way of folding your arms. Now isn’t that a powerful medium to explain to someone that that’s how most people feel in most change processes? |
So you see, the activity with a context have much more meaning than just the activity alone.
However, having said (or write) that, sometimes you decide to use team building exercises to get a message across, but some other messages jump out. Don’t discard it. If that happens, go with the flow.
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Return from Team Building Exercises to Free Team Building Activities
Return from Team Building Exercises to Sustainable-Employee-Motivation
