Use Team Building Initiatives for Team Development
Team Building Initiatives for Team Development
- Learn faster with active engagement. When you sit in a workshop and hear a lecture about trust and communication, it seems to make sense but you’re not getting an opportunity to apply that learning. It’s like learning to play tennis. You can watch a video and read a book, but only when you put the racket in your hand and get out on the court do you really know what you’ve learned. The same is true for team skills like effective communication. Clients often say they want to improve communication. What does that mean? How will you know when it’s improved? If I walked into your office on Monday morning and you were communicating better, what would that look and sound like? Team building initiatives gives participants the practice and the clarity they need.
- Produce greater results by interacting. People often learn faster and produce more when they are interacting with others. Think about running a 5k marathon with a group of people versus running the same distance by yourself. What might be challenging by yourself tends to be a lot more fun when you are surrounded by a group of people working toward the same goal. People feed off the energy and enthusiasm of all the other participants. Once your team experiences that dynamic, it naturally spills over into the workplace.
- Acting together stretches creativity. There’s an old Japanese Proverb “None of us are as smart as all of us”. Bringing people together with professionally instructed team initiatives helps participants see challenges in a different light and overcome problems by interacting. We provided our Build-A-Bike workshop for a client in New York last month where participants started seeing their small group as separate from the whole team, simulating the “silo effect”. Our team initiatives are designed to make sure the teams have to interact with each other, and thus breaking down those silos. This enhanced their team development back at the office when they were able to dissolve silos and share ideas there as well.
Team Initiatives Help Your Team WOrk Faster and More Efficiently
In today’s economy everybody has to learn to do more with less. Using team initiatives helps your group learn to work together faster and produce greater results, all while having fun!
This article was written by Colette Peterson. Colette is a Corporate Team Building Consultant with The Leader’s Institute headquartered out of Dallas Texas. You can reach Colette at 800-872-7830.
