Team Building Activities - Prepare Your Team For Success



team building activities

Team building activities help develop a culture of teamwork in the organization. What is the value of that?

Well, teamwork harnesses the potentials of individual members of the team and produces results that exceed the sum of the individual contribution of the members of the team.

With teamwork, 1 + 1 +1 + 1 > 4

That is, the whole is greater than the sum of the individual components.

To illustrate, a broom stick on its own cannot sweep a floor clean. But when grouped together, the resulting broom-bunch can accomplish so much more. That is the power of team work.

Bottom line.

Great leaders promote teamwork and team spirit within the organization. It is the unrelenting team spirit of your people that build bridges and scale barriers. It is that extra bit that gives companies competitive advantage.

Now let's consider some team building activities that help foster teamwork in the organization.

Team Building Activities - Some Examples

1. Form Cross-Functional Teams Where Possible

A Cross-functional team consists of people from different functions such as marketing, HR, operations, sales etc. When people for various teams work together on business related issues, a better understand results that can translate into improved communication in subsequent projects.

So where possible, use teams that include people from various functions in problem solving.

2. Use The Power of Relationships

When employees have relationships that go beyond just work, they tend to be more cooperative when it comes to work.

How do you deploy that knowledge to work for the organization?

Well, you can make the workplace much more than work. Your organization can promote activities that encourage people to relax and have fun.

For example, you could have a monthly or quarterly football match between teams. Each team should consist of at least two function areas e.g. marketing and operations could form one team and corporate affairs (public relations) and finance could form another team. That team arrangement can serve to break the function-spirit and promote good relationships between members of functions grouped together as single teams.

Besides football, you could arrange a work out day that includes fitness exercises, athletics, table tennis etc. The key is not just the games. It's how you loop people together for this activities that promote team spirit in the organization.

3. Weekly Or Bi-Weekly Review Of Teamwork

It is common knowledge that what you profess eventually becomes what you hold dear.

Since you want to promote teamwork in your organization, get your people to repeatedly profess the ideals of teamwork.

How?

You could get a consultant or a steering committee to produce a workbook on tenets of teamwork. The workbook should answer the question: "what does teamwork mean for us as a business? What activities and behaviours foster team spirit?"

Once you have that question answered, break what needs to be done into weekly review discussions by each team.

Every well organized system have each function having at least one departmental meeting per week. Spare 15-20 minutes during this meeting each week to discuss an aspect of teamwork that can be put to use for that week.

Let team members identify one incident during the previous week where good team spirit was displayed and one incident where team spirit was missing. What could have been done better in the later case?

This team building activity will force your people to think. It will ingrain the importance of teamwork in the psyche and the organization will benefit.

The team building activities discussed above is only a tip of the iceberg. You can come up with a long list of team building activities that will work particularly well for your organization.

The first step is to understand the power of teamwork. Obviously, you already do . . . that is why you're on this page reading this.

The next step is to design team building activities that are realistic and practical for your particular kind of business. Then implement them. Thereafter, monitor results to see whether your objectives are achieved.

If necessary, modify the initial concept to get desired results.

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