Team Building Exercises

 

Team building exercises range from simple problem solving tasks and puzzles to more sophisticated project based challenges, business games and simulations.

 

Irrespective of the level of complexity, the aim of such team-based exercises is to get people engaged and interacting with one another to achieve either a competitive or collaborative outcome. 

 

Competitive team building exercises will put teams up against other teams in scored games or tasks to draw out competitive behaviours and drivers that may simulate commercially competitive environments. 

 

Exercises such as sports contests, Amazing Races etc may fit into this category.  Quite often commercial sales teams will favour this approach to bring out the competitive spirit and focused commercial aggression of the sales force.

 

Collaborative team building exercises will require numerous sub-teams to actually work together towards a common outcome to re-enforce the importance of cross-functional unity and cultural strength. 

 

The styles of exercise that help achieve this may have painting, musical and charity focused themes.

 

The major styles of team building exercise thus tend to fit into the following broad categories.

 

• Simple fun level games and activities

• Tailored problem solving / initiative tasks

• Table top business games

• Competitive team vs team formats

• Collaborative unified outcome formats

 

Team sizes vary typically from 4 – 15 (less than 4 can see teams working too hard, and anything over 15 will see behavioural dynamics diffused too much and also potential for “wall flowers”).

 

Delivery can be indoor or outdoor.

 

Ideally a team building exercise will have sufficient forethought afforded to its selection to match the age, level of status and culture of the participants.  

 

If not, then instead of enhancing the team building process and enabling working relationships to be improved damage can be done to the interpersonal dynamics within and between teams.

 

To select the very best team building exercises an experienced provider like Sabre that can cover the full spectrum from pure fun to serious learning outcomes can be a huge help.