Depending on who you ask, you might hear that team building is the most important thing you can do to make sure your team works together smoothly. Others will tell you it’s not team building that’s key, but team bonding. Read more
Looking for an awesome list of over 670 fun rapid fire style icebreaker or conversation starter questions for your next team building or meeting? We have ’em! We ripped open our Rapid Question Generator and have put all the questions down below for you to use for free. If you’d like some ideas how you can turn these questions into a fun icebreaker or make a meeting less boring, check out our guide to making meetings less boring. We use variations of these in our corporate team building events to help break the ice or get some laughs. Read more
Ah, corporate offsites: They can simultaneously strike fear into the hearts of retreat planners and either excitement (Hawaii, anyone?) or boredom (another Lego competition in the local park?) in the hearts of employees. Offsites can be incredibly valuable for team-building, but getting the event to go off without a hitch — while keeping everyone happy — often comes with some challenges. Read more
Many company founders start their businesses with the best of intentions in mind. They want to build a successful company, certainly, but they often also want to become pillars of their local communities. Read more
If you tell your employees you’ll be doing some team-building activities together, what would their reactions be? If you’re getting more eye rolls than enthusiastic “Heck yeah!”s, that’s a sign you need some fresh employee bonding ideas. Read more
Part 2 of Our Interview with Chris Cavert, Ed.D.Dr. Chris Cavert is an internationally known educator, trainer and speaker and recipient of the AEE Karl Rohnke creativity award. He has been working with groups of all ages for more than 25 years. Chris is the author of over a dozen books related to activity-based experiential group development. He holds an undergraduate degree in physical education, a master’s degree in Experiential Education and an educational doctorate in Curriculum & Instruction. As an educator Chris focuses on how to use team building activities to develop social-emotional intelligence and pro-social skills within groups of all ages. For more information visit: FUNdoing.com
Build personal relationships with every member of the group that you as a manager supervise or are accountable for. If a manager is purposefully taking time to get to know everyone on his or her team, that opens the door to so many other problem-solving opportunities. You work through conflict a little faster and smoother if you know more about each other and each other’s needs. This to me is the simplest and most important thing for any manager who is leading people: put your pencil down and take the time to go out and talk to people.
A quote from my friend Molly Foote, that I use all the time is, “The more we know about someone, the less likely we are to hurt someone.” Connecting with people and getting to know them on a deeper level creates more empathy, strength around dealing with conflict, accepting each other’s differences, and the ability to work together to move forward.
Don’t take anything personally. In life and in being a leader, it’s hard to not take things personally when you’re being attacked by a person or a group of people who are really in need of help. But they attack the person who’s trying to help.
And the biggest challenge for leaders is not to avoid conflict. Because a lot of new managers I encounter will create an environment or will have behaviors that sweep things under the rug. They’ll do everything to avoid conflicts because they don’t want to deal with it. But that doesn’t move a group forward. Groups need to be able to push through difficult challenges.
I was given great advice years ago, that we need to experience difficulty so that we can learn to recognize and choose difference behaviors. Read more
Part 1 of Our Interview with Chris Cavert, Ed.D.Dr. Chris Cavert is an internationally known educator, trainer and speaker and recipient of the AEE Karl Rohnke creativity award. He has been working with groups of all ages for more than 25 years. Chris is the author of over a dozen books related to activity-based experiential group development. He holds an undergraduate degree in physical education, a master’s degree in Experiential Education and an educational doctorate in Curriculum & Instruction. As an educator Chris focuses on how to use team building activities to develop social-emotional intelligence and pro-social skills within groups of all ages. For more information visit: FUNdoing.com
A lot of people call outings team building. So in their mind going out together is building teams. And I don’t disagree with that. I think part of it is true in the sense of, when you do things together, you have an opportunity to learn about each other a little bit more. You’re going to have conversations. Find out similarities and differences. You’re going to see how people have fun, see how people deal with maybe challenges or stress. Because any kind of outings where you have to make decisions together has some level of stress or possibly conflict. So there are all those parts of building a team in there. What’s missing, is the idea of we’re reflecting on an experience. These outings that people call team building is more what I call accidental team building; it just kind of happens because you’re together. Read more
“If you love what you do, you never have to work another day in your life” – Marc Anthony.
Every company has the potential of offering a fun, energetic and creative environment. This is a positive place where people can be trusted to do their jobs because they are happy and inspired by their employer’s engagement strategy.
An engagement strategy is a business plan that focuses on keeping employees engaged in the work they are doing. This can be accomplished by making cultivating workplace creativity a priority. Cultivating workplace creativity is proven to increase employee productivity, retention, and sales. As a result, companies have larger profits and happier workers. Many companies have engagement strategies, but fail to implement them. So try these five simple tips and see how workplace creativity strategies improves your business.
Apply motivational techniques to everyday tasks to improve workplace creativity. Video games hook their users with quick responses, goals, badges, transparency, competition, leveling up, and collaboration. These same methods can be applied in the workplace.
Congratulations on completing your team building experience! You should now have a super powered team that is completely perfect. No? Your team is only mostly perfect? Well, that’s because your team building should never be “completed.” The value of any team building comes from reflection and implementation. The actual activity, while probably awesome and Instagram-worthy, is neutral in achieving your goals. Follow these strategic steps to create value for your team in between epic outings.
During your event one of our team building ninjas likely led your group in a discussion about how your team performed during the challenge. Your company likely already has a debriefing procedure or strategy in place to discuss how projects turn out. Debriefing is where we examine the experience to find the value and actionable data. The key with team building debriefing is the actual activity is inconsequential. The specifics of what your team did to accomplish a team building challenge doesn’t matter nearly as much as how your group functioned.
Michelle Cummings, a leader in team development and coauthor of A Teachable Moment warns “If participants are not allowed to reflect on their experiences and relate them to the outside world, then a lot of the learning may be lost” (Cummings. “Effective Debriefing Tools and Techniques”) Gather the team together once you’re back at the office. Engage with the staff about how they felt and what they noticed after the activity. You can even ask each member to write down one take away from the event. Utilize these takeaways as talking points in the future. Check out Cumming’s guide “Effective Debriefing Tools and Techniques” for some great ideas on switching up your debriefing technique. It will keep things fresh and interesting. Read more
Ask any business person who’s worked up the ranks to Chief Executive Officer, and they’ll tell you that building a successful company begins by creating a solid foundation among staff members. That occurs once a team can work together with a high degree of trust. So how exactly do you capitalize on creating a high-trust environment in your workplace? You create conflict!
Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has said, “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.” When a team can work thru conflicts that arise in the workplace, they lay the groundwork for trust, problem solving, and accountability.
Vulnerability is quite possibly the number one reason your team isn’t making significant gains. The reasoning is simple: No one clocks in for the day ready to let their inadequacies surface at the morning staff meeting. As a result, group members tend to spend a significant amount of time attempting to save face in front of their team rather than focusing on the task at hand.
Conflict fosters a healthy discourse among staff members that paves the way for teams to build an interpersonal trust. This authentic, vulnerability-based trust allows staff to feel safe when asking for help, accepting input, and admitting shortcomings. A February 2016 publication of The New York Times Magazine entitled “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” stated that, “Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.” When a team has reached this level of trust, you’ll see an immediate increase in productivity. It will take time, but the results are more than worth it for your organization!
