One of the greatest challenges in organising team building events is the need to instil creativity in the activities implemented. It is a fact that coming up with fresh ideas yourself is painful and time consuming. What’s more, team building activities have to be aligned with the corporate objectives of holding the event in the first place.

Nevertheless, if you already have some idea of what you want to achieve, you can then check out the following creative team building ideas and even expound from them. This makes your task easier, and also provides you with some basis to work with.

Joining Instructions (An ice-breaking activity)

Get people into groups of between three to ten people. In team clusters, instruct all teams to work together to join several parts of their body parts together. For instance, four hands, two wrists, six knees and one thumb. The first team to complete the exercise will shout “joined” to the activity facilitators. It is up to the event organiser to come up with increasingly challenging commands for the teams and also to tabulate scores for a winner.

The Personality Tree (Team bonding and personality determination)

In groups of between three and five, distribute pens or markers with paper to each team member. Next, get them to draw a tree depicting the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, buds, flowers, thorns and fruits. Each area of the tree symbolizes the following personality areas:

Root:		beliefs or influence

Thorns:        challenges

Leaves:        sources of information

Branches:	connections and relationships

Fruit:		achievements

Buds:		ambition and ideas

Truck:		stability

Flowers:	strengths and specialities

In a team, discuss all these areas with one another, taking care not to be judgemental but instead provide constructive inputs. As a team building event organiser, you are free to customise the exercise with other elements such as birds and bees, or other items such as dead branches and leaves.

Collecting Autographs (Team building, association and creativity)

Draw a grid of boxes on a piece of paper and develop copies of it to be distributed to each of the team members. Give everyone a pen of different colour, and get them to draw a matchstick image of themselves on the first box with their signatures at the bottom. Then, within a time span of 5 minutes, let everyone go around the room collecting autographs and matchstick drawings from others. It’s best that each person get to know one another better before moving on. Stop the exercise at the end of 5 minutes and single out the person with the highest number of signatures. Get him or her to describe each person that the signature resembles on his or her sheet. You will be surprised at the answers!

These activities are just a glimpse of other activities that would make your team building exercise a success.