Posted on January 16, 2010.
Our Ten Team Building Exercises Top You have recruited individual members of your team. You set your goal. You have developed a plan and timetable. Now, the trick is to get all unique individuals working together towards the same goal. Given the varied personalities, communication skills and personal agendas individual members bring with them to the team, get your team working together can be a challenge.
In the most productive teams, members individually and in collaboration focused on reaching the goal of the team. Members understand the interdependent nature of the team: that their individual work depends on and affects the quality of the work of others and, finally, the team's ability to achieve its objective. respect the members, appreciate and recognize the contribution of each single person to team efforts, but place the greatest emphasis on achieving the cooperation objective of the team.
team building experience has been in vogue not long ago. The team travel offsite for a "fun" day games ropes and unusual problem solving, usually in a center of outdoor education. Unfortunately, too often, there was little monitoring and lessons learned never return to the workplace. Today, the focus has shifted to the exercise of exchange of team that can be accomplished at the beginning of a meeting.
Follow these steps to map a key exercise in team building production:
1. Keep it simple. It should be easy to implement in a typical meeting room.
2. It need not be expensive. You can get a lot of miles on basic office supplies or a few items from your pantry.
3. The exercise should be adapted for normal office clothing or members of the team should be informed ahead of time to dress appropriately.
4. People have trouble relating to large groups, so divide the team into smaller units of 2 to 4 or 6 people. By removing barriers and creating partnerships within these small groups, team members will be better able to relate to the larger team.
5. Instructions must be easy to understand, especially by non-native speakers of English in your group.
6. Limited instructions may be part of the team building exercise. Forcing people to understand what to do or how to do something helps team members identify skills and abilities in themselves and their peers who can help them define their roles in the team : leader, facilitator, problem solver, communicator, etc
7. The exercise should mobilize all its members quickly.
8. It should present a problem that has several solutions to enable creativity, but can not be solved through collaboration and cooperative action.
9. You can increase the level of difficulty of any exercise by adding a complication such as "do not talk," or speeding up things by asking: "How can you go faster?"
10. At the end of the year, it is essential that a facilitator, often the team leader, leading the team in reflecting on what happened, choices, and how they interact with each others. Team members should discuss what they would do differently next time. Reflection is essential to identifying and enhancing learning.
Try these exercises as a team to get your team off to a good start.
1. Scrambled Jigsaw. Before the team arrives, place a header on every table. To handle the time factor, the use of puzzles for children big piece of 100 pieces or more. Remove 5 pieces of each puzzle and move them to another table. As the team arrives, divide members among the tables. Ask the teams to fully complete their puzzle, by any means, within the shortest possible time. As puzzles are completed and teams realize pieces are missing, they will be forced to negotiate with other teams to complete their puzzle. This promotion of exercise.
