7 Successful Team Building Activities

Team building activities are simple, easy ways to get your employees involved in honing their capacity to work together more productively. Typically these activities are viewed as "fun" events but they are loaded with powerful lessons about problem solving, communications, trust and respect. And the participants aren't the only ones who benefit from these lessons. Team building activities give management an opportunity to see the dynamics at play among their group giving them a better idea of how to lead and communicate with them.

Team building exercises can run the gamut of a simple kid's game to more complex problem solving challenges. They can be done indoors or out, daytime or night. The props used in these exercises are inexpensive. The one element of these exercises that you have to invest some money in is a qualified facilitator. Experienced facilitators are essential to organizing, monitoring and evaluating the activities. A poorly trained facilitator can easily turn what should be a productive experience into a complete waste of time. The importance of the facilitator's role will become evident as you review the exercises listed below.

1. The Mine Field

This is a simple exercise designed to build trust and communication skills. It can be performed inside or outside and doesn't require any special equipment. First prepare the mine field. This is simply a matter of placing objects on the ground like balls or Styrofoam cups or plates within a designated "field". Next randomly pair up members of the team. You can draw names out of a hat if that works for you. The idea is for one member to negotiate the mine field with their eyes closed based on the guidance of the second member. So basically you have one team member who cannot see or talk being led by another who can both see and talk but who must not touch or physically guide the other.

Before starting the actual trip through the field, allow 2 or 3 minutes for the couple to work out communication methods. After the first walk through, the members swap places and try it again. You can make this exercise as simple or complex as your team can handle.

2. Group Juggle

This is an exercise in team problem solving and cooperation. Ideally your team would consist of six to eight people but you can make it larger or smaller to meet your needs. Have the team form a circle and then introduce a ball. Explain that the ball has to be tossed to every person in the circle but no person can handle it twice. Give them the ball and let them have at it. Time their first effort. When they've completed the task tell them how long it took and challenge them to do it faster. Give them 2 minutes to communicate. After the second attempt ask them if they can do it faster yet and ask them to tell you just how fast they can get it done. Allow 3 minutes for planning. This gives the group opportunities to not only solve a problem but to predict how fast a team can perform it.

3. Improvisation Circle

This is a simple ice breaker and an excellent exercise for newly formed teams. Have the entire team form a circle facing in. The facilitator explains that they are about to tell a story about a subject and the team is responsible for creating it one word at a time. When given the subject, the person selected to start the story will turn to the person to his or her right, make eye contact, and say the first word. That second person will turn to the right, make eye contact and say the second word and so on. So if the subject was "birthday cake" the story could start like today..is..my..birthday..and. Where it gets interesting is when a team member changes the drift of the story using a single word and the response of the others either getting back on track or having fun with the new tangent. At the end of the story they not only have created something together, but the eye contact has made strangers a much more cohesive group.

4. Chew Gum and Walk At The Same Time

Another ice breaker for new teams which provides competition but more importantly, a safe place to fail. The game is pretty simple. Two people start it off with one person asking the other "what are you doing?" If the other person replies "I'm ironing." The first person must then mime a person ironing. The second person then asks the first "What are you doing?" and the first person, who is still miming ironing must quickly answer with another activity. The second person then has to mime whatever that activity is. This goes back and forth until one of them stalls in answering a question or just gives up. Once that person drops out another team member takes their place.

This is not only a challenge in that the body is performing one task while the mind is challenged to think of an entirely different activity, but it allows people to show a side of their personality that they may be hesitant to reveal in a work environment.

5. Catastrophe

This is an advanced game in group problem solving and requires some preparation. The team is given a disaster scenario like they have crash landed in the Alaskan wilderness in sub zero temperatures and the pilot and copilot have been killed. The team has managed to salvage twelve items and their task is to prioritize those items as to their importance in the rescue and survival of the team. The team is tasked not only with ranking items, but explaining why. For this game to work, the facilitator has to know the "right" answer as provided by an expert. In this instance it would need to come from an accomplished instructor in survival training. The team is given 20 minutes to complete the task and then their answers are compared to the expert's. This exercise gives an insight into the team's thought processes and the depth in which they were willing to go to think out the problem.

6. Build Your Own

This is an exercise that challenges the team's ability to be creative in obtaining a goal for which they have little experience. After the team has been through a number of exercises, he or she challenges them to create their own game to encourage a specific team behavior like communication or problem solving. Not only do they have to come up with the game but describe how it achieves the objective.

7. Evaluations

This is the very "real game" that is played by team members and managers alike after every exercise. Each activity needs to be examined by asking a series of questions that evaluates how the team performed and what can be learned or improved by the experience. This is where the facilitator can become invaluable using coaching techniques to assist both members and management in coming up with fair and accurate evaluations.

Successful team building activities can have a very real impact on the performance of an organization. Do you think your company could benefit? Why not at least explore the possibilities.

Business management expert Mark Polman knows the value of a well functioning team and sees team building activities as an excellent means to insure an organization is performing at an optimal pace. If you would like to learn more team activities and their benefits, Mark encourages you to visit Successful Team Building.