Let’s take a look at three things that you could focus on to make your team building a bit more successful. Acting on these three things should be able to help you find better traction inside of your own team building activities.
Are you ready for this?
- First, when you’re working building a team, consider the safety of the environment. A safe environment is pivotal because growth will not occur unless awareness can occur. Awareness typically doesn’t occur in a dangerous environment. An article in Forbes references several numbers to be aware of as a business owner. Among them is an HBR study that found that 58% of employees trust strangers over their own bosses. How can you build a team when the environment is percevied as toxic or dangerous to share opinions. Healthy team building would blend two ideas togehter: “it’s safe to do new things”, and “new things will be uncomfortable at first”. If you go too much to the uncomfortable side of things, people clam up, and you’re not going to have team building be efficient or effective. If you attempt only a fun environment, people will play along without truly sharing thoughts on company improvement possibilities. If you find yourself in a situation where everybody had a good time, but you get back to the office and nothing seems to have changed in productivity, you may not have the safe environment you thought you had.
- The second key to consider when facilitating a team building activity is to ensure that the activity actually maximizes and amplifies the strengths of every participating team member. This can be difficult to do. Many times, you can find business owners that conduct team building activities that slant towards certain employees’ strengths and others weaknesses. They may not do this intentionally, but it occurs nonetheless. Lets use a ropes course as an example of this. As a former ropes course facilitator, I saw many timed where the more physically adept team members enjoyed the activities while less physically active team members did not enjoy the “growth opportunites”. Consider blending these worlds where you sit down and ask, “How can this team building activity, maximize the strengths of every member on my team” or “Will this activity provide a learning environment for every team member to maximize their growth?”
- The third key to consider is one that most people don’t think about, but can be highly effective for team building activities. Appraise the possibility of bringing in a third party facilitator; somebody that is outside of the day to day business, and somebody that’s not familiar with with the goings-on of the company. One of the reasons for this is that the third party facilitator becomes a sounding board to ideas that perhaps employees are a little bit nervous to share with their higher ups. Perhaps, even, the employees don’t have the relationships with their manager or their boss that you’re hoping for them to have. You’re doing the team building activity for them to build that relationship. A good third party facilitator can open up that conversation and the ability for people to share with the facilitator what’s going on in the business. When that happens, team leaders or managers can become participants inside the team building activity, rather than trying to be the ones running the team building activity.
If those keys resonate with you then I would love to talk to you about an opportunity I offer teams as a facilitator. It’s called The Leadership Game. The Leadership Game is a team-buioding activity, and so much more. It can only ne facilitated by select John Maxwell Team members. The Leadership Game opens an opportunity for teams to get together and spend a couple hours doing exactly what we just covered in the 3 keys above. It’s a game where teams can come together to focus on building the company, focus on building their relationships, and be able to come out better connected with an increase in their own productivity. Team members come out of the game, knowing their strengths have been maximized, and that their team members strengths have been maximized as well.