A great corporate team building program always has three essential parts that are vital to the success of the team building event.  First, you want to add interactive activities that build camaraderie. You also want to teach valuable lessons about company interdependency. Finally, if you want a great corporate team building program, add a “Wow!” moment along the way.

Interactive Activities that Build Camaraderie

Interactive activities are the first essential component of a great team building event. For instance, a group can really find a lot out about their fellow team members when given challenging questions that require them to seek the answers from others in their group. This not only encourages valuable interaction but they enjoy learning about each other in the process. Also, when tasks are given that require a variety of skill sets, team members find out about the various talents and skills that make up their group.

Teach Valuable Lessons on Company Interdependency

You also want to teach valuable lessons about how all of the component departments (divisions, regions, etc.) of a company are interdependent with each other. For example a good way to learn this lesson in a team building activity is when “competing” groups are “stumped” in solving puzzles and answering questions unless they collaborate and cooperate with the respective competition [other teams]. It’s kind of fun to witness the green light go on when people realize that when we all work together for the overall good, everyone comes out a winner.

Add a “Wow!” Moment Along the Way.

The most important part of great team building is the “Wow!” factor. When a group takes part in a team building program and are pleasantly surprised, or emotionally touched, I would call that a “Wow Factor”. At a philanthropic corporate team building program in Toronto recently, most of the group were completely surprised to learn that the bikes that they had built as part of the activities at the event were being donated right then and there to boys and girls from a local charity. The adults who built the bikes were just as excited as the kids streaming into the room who received the bikes. There have been many moments where tears of joy were shed, but there is a special “Wow” moment that stands out in my mind. That occurred at an event in Virginia, when a chaperone with the children from the charity shared with the team building participants that most of the children were receiving their first new bikes in their young lives.

So if you want to create a great corporate team building program, add interactive activities, teach valuable lessons about interdependency, and add a “Wow!” moment along the way that leaves your team feeling really good about the activity as a whole.

Bill Resh is a speaker and trainer specializing in Team Building in Atlanta, GA that insert fun and energy into any convention or annual meeting. (http://www.teambuildingatlantaga.com/) Bill teaches team building events in major cities Atlanta, Washington, DC, Orlando, and Miami.

Camaraderie Quest, being a technically powered team building  scavenger hunt was a great match for this group.  The team was challenged through a combination of brainy trivia, strategic thinking and out of the box creativity to complete the customized course which took place in the historic downtown core of Ann Arbor Michigan.  The Thomson Reuter team, which is usually spread out in offices all over the country, where excited to spend time together, building trust, friendship and a shared experience that will create a lasting memory for the entire group for years to come.  It was great to be part of this team building and boosting event.

Last week, Dr. Joyce Phillips, who is the principal at the Houston CAN! Academy invited me to come out and conduct a Creating a Team Culture Team Building program for she and her fellow administrators at the school, and I have to tell you that the folks that I met there are real heroes.  We are often asked to come in and conduct in-service sessions for teachers and administrators, but very few educational institutions realize the value of indentifying concepts and skills that are critical in the business world and teaching those skills to their kids in the classroom, but that is exactly what these heroes do every day. 

In the team building program, we focused on ways to build confidence speaking in front of groups, problem-solving skills, and ways to really build the self-confidence of each other and the kids that they teach as well.  These are the skills, that, if their kids master them, they can break the chains of poverty in just one generation. 

By the way, I had a lot of fun working with these folks.  If you’d like to make a donation to the Academy, visit their website at http://www.texanscan.org/online_donation.asp

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Public Speaking Fear comes from Past Failures (or Pervceived Failures)

The first thing to remember about having a terrible speech is that public speaking fear comes from situations like this where we have a failure — or even just a perceived failure.  Anytime we try something, and we don’t perform very well, we will become more nervous when we try to attempt the skill again.  Think about it…  What would have happened if the first time you ever drove a car, you had a terrible accident.  If that drive was your only experience behind the wheel, it will be nerve-racking to get back into the driver’s seat.  If the first time you ever used a computer, you accidentally erased the hard-drive, you would be very timid about trying again.  This is what happens to a lot of people try to develop presentation skills.  They give it a try, things don’t go so well, so they give up.  In our heads, when we don’t perform well in front of a group, we think that we absolutely failed.  However, in most situations, you probably did a lot better than you think.  We tend to exaggerate our failures when we think about them internally.

For example, when I was in college, I was the youngest intern at a huge Fortune 500 company, and at the end of the summer, before going back to school, I had to give a presentation to the intern committee, my intern peers, my boss, and quite a few of the corporate vice-presidents who flew in just for the presentations.  I was the third to present.  I had memorized my entire presentation and got to where I could deliver it flawlessly within the 15 minute time limit.  However, when I get nervous, I speak REALLY fast.  I gave the entire presentation in about five minutes and said every word.  I was so nervous that I had sweat on my forhead that I kept wiping off my brow with the sleeve of my shirt.  When I sat down, I knew that I had totally failed.  I was embarrassed, and it was torture to have to sit around the table for the rest of the afternoon as each of my peers got up and presented flawlessly.  Interestingly, though, a friend of mine who was one of the other interns is an attorney in my hometown, Ft. Worth.  I saw her a few years ago, and I mentioned that I had spent the last 12 years trying to overcome that horrible speech that I gave when we worked together.  She looked back at me puzzled, and said, “What horrible speech?”  The performance stuck with me, but I suspect that most of the people in the room probably didn’t really notice.  That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t perfom well, but it should give you a little confidence in that we are typically a lot harder on ourselves than the audience is on us.

Change the Way that you Prepare for a Speech

One of the biggest mistakes that I made in that big speech was that I tried to memorize my speech.  Writing a talk word-for-word and trying to memorize it is the absolute worst way to prepare for a speech.  When I created the Fearless Presentations class, one of the first things that I designed was a simple way to prepare for a speech without memorizing it.  We typically spend a couple of days helping participants master this skill, but in a nutshell, the technique works like this.  First, narrow down your topic to something pretty specific, because the more that you try to say in one siting, the less likely anyone in the audience will be to remember it.  Once you narrow down your topic, organize your speech into just a few key points.  Three, four, or five key points will work well in most situations.  I design my presentations by choosing which key points are most important to explaining the topic.  Let’s say that you have a broad topic, and you have about ten or fifteen things that need to be said about the topic.  Chances are that after you cover the first few points, your audience will start to drift off anyway, so instead of covering all ten items, pick the three or four most important items instead.  Give a couple of pieces of proof or support for each key point.  That way, if you have three key points and a couple of support for each item, you really only have to memorize about nine things.  You could write nine things on one note card and have room to spare.

Get a Good Coach

One of the fastest ways to recover from a terrible speech is to get a good coach.  I don’t mean get someone to critique your performance.  A lot of well-intended coworkers or friends tend to do this, and it just makes things worse for the most part.  What you want instead is someone who can identify a few of the key strengths that you have as a speaker and who can help you develop those strengths.  For instance, where a coworker might tell you that you are monotone, a good coach would help you see that your pretty detail-oriented and have a knack for providing solid support.  Since that is a tallent, if you stop trying to memorize your speech (see above) you would automatically increase your enthusiasm.  Another example would be where a friend might point out that your hands are shaking, a good coach would see that you have a talent for building rapport with your audience (even though you might feel a little shy).  If you develop that skill, your nervousness will decrease and your shakey hands will diminish dramatically.  Focus on the things that you do well versus trying to correct symptoms, and you’ll have a lot more success.

Bottom-line is that when you have one of those inevitable poor public speaking performances, it’s not the end of the world.  You can recover from it.  If you use it as a learning experience, you’ll become a stronger speaker the next time that you give a presentation.

Doug Staneart is a public speaking coach for The Leader’s Institute headquartered out of Dallas Texas. He is the founder of The Fearless Presentations Public Speaking Class and author of the book, Fearless Presentations.

Persuasive Public Speaking.  One of the most effective ways to persuade your audience is to relay a personal story or an example that shows the benefits of your recommendation to your audience.  Religious leaders have used this technique for over 2000 years with great success.  This video explains how the persuasive public speaking technique works.  Fearless Presentations is a presentation training course offered in major cities all over the world, and here is a video from Doug Staneart, CEO of The Leader’s Institute, who gives a explains this technique in the courtyard of the Vatican.

Build a team atmosphere by giving back. 
Team activities are designed to build more of a team atmosphere, help individuals learn how and why people act “that way” and how to deal more effectively with each other.  The end result includes improved trust and respect among co-workers and managers, which ultimately results in increased effectiveness.  And when you combine that with philanthropic team activities, your team is sure to feel more connected.   The Rescue Bear is a great example of how you can tie all these things together.  Team members learn about personality styles through a series of fun team activities; and in the end, they’ve built teddy bears that are donated to local fire departments or emergency personnel.
So if you want to reduce conflict and improve morale, stretch your comfort zone to build trust, use interactive sessions to boost learning, and build a team atmosphere by giving back.  Create value among your team members with an understanding of personality styles.  When people feel valued in an organization, they are more likely to contribute ideas and energy.  They will go the extra mile.

Colette Peterson is a Corporate Team Building Consultant with The Leader’s Institute headquartered out of Dallas Texas.  She specialized in team building in New York City, New York.  You can reach Colette at The Leader’s Institute®, 1-800-872-7830.

We just finished a fun team building scavenger hunt in downtown Minneapolis a few days ago, and it was an absolute BLAST! The Camaraderie Quest is a high-tech scavenger hunt team building event that is custom designed for every client, and Minneapolis was a fantastic course to set up.

This Camaraderie Quest was designed for as a group from General Mills, and it ended up being a combination of both an outdoor team building event and an indoor team building event. Downtown Minneapolis is a very unique downtown area, because a lot of the big buildings are connected via sky-bridge and tunnels, so it made for a fantastic course with lots of surprises. The group started out exploring an outdoor mall and ended up robbing a stage coach (and, unfortunately, getting kicked out of the Wells Fargo building in the process), but it made for a lot of laughs. Fun was had by all, and at the conclusion, we added up all of the points to crown the General Mills Camaraderie Quest High-Tech Scavenger Hunt Champion — which was almost as much fun as the event itself!

I’ve added a few select pictures of the event.