By Doug Staneart
The Best Team Building Secret is to Create Lots of Energy and Enthusiasm
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If you are looking for a fantastic team building idea or a secret to conducting a great team building
event, the best piece of wisdom I have ever come across is the
importance of energy and enthusiasm. Often times, event planners or
people who are organizing a convention or annual event will hire a
professional team building
expert to facilitate some type of team building activity, but if you
have a smaller group of people, how can you get the same type of results
without breaking your budget? The key is to create a team building
activity that does three things. First, the activity has to insert
energy into your meeting. Second, you have to facilitate in a way that
everyone stays active and involved the entire time. And finally, the
activity or event must create some type of emotional response from the
participants.
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Team Building Events Must Insert Energy into Your Meeting
The easiest way to insert energy into an event or meeting is to get
the audience involved in some type of physical activity. The longer
that participants are standing around (or worse, sitting down) doing
nothing or listening to the facilitator speak, the more bored they will
become and the less energy will be in the room. Many facilitators will
try to use questions to the audience as a way to get them involved, but
this can backfire pretty quickly (especially in a larger group). The
reason why is that only one participant at a time will be able to
respond, so most everyone else is still just listening. One of my
favorite ways to push energy into the team building activity is to use
the dividing into teams as a way to get people moving around and
communicating. For instance, if you have a huge group of people,
instead, planners will often put team numbers on nametags, etc. so that
dividing into groups is much easier. Most often, the planner will then
number all of the tables so that as participants enter the room, the
organizer themselves by table numbers. You can do something similar,
though, and insert a lot more energy by hiding the numbers and just
letting people know when they enter the room that they can move to any
table. Once everyone is in the room, just announce that their first
challenge is to find their group, so, “Go find the team mates that have
your same number.” The energy in the room erupts immediately, and the
group is now more open to doing more activities.
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| Photo by in2action.co.uk |
Keep Everyone Involved and Active
Once you have the energy up in the room, you will want to keep
everyone involved in the activities in order to keep the energy (and
fun) high. This is absolutely the hardest thing to do throughout the
entire program, but it is also the most critical. The key to making
this happen is to create activities that require the participants to
work together. For instance, philanthropic team building is very
popular now, and one type of team building event is where participants
build bicycles for needy kids. Quite often, organizers will think that
the building of the bikes is the most important part of the event, but
they mistakenly forget that building bikes (or really doing any type of
physical activity) by itself is not much fun. If you just organize your
teams into small groups and tell them to build bikes, one or two people
in each group will jump in and start putting the pieces together, while
the rest stand around and watch. So, at any given moment in the event,
two-thirds to three-quarters of all of the people in the room will be
standing around doing nothing. Instead, you’ll want to combine
activities that involve more people such as adding in some type of task
that groups need to complete to earn each part. The key to making this
work is to scan the room during the event and look specifically for
people watching versus participating. If you have a lot of the former,
make sure and add additional tasks to the activity.
Create Some Type of Emotional Response from the Team Activity
Interestingly enough, the type of emotional response doesn’t really
matter as much as the presence of the emotion. For instance, in the
charity team building event mentioned above, the giving of the bicycle
to the kids at the end of the event creates an incredibly emotional and
memorable ending to the event. However, sometimes the emotion that
facilitators are trying to create is pure competition. A race or a
contest can add energy
to an event. (Although, this is tricky because competition among
teammates can often hamper team building versus building teamwork.)
Sometimes, anger and frustration can increase the energy in a
surprisingly positive way. For instance, in some team events, the rules
are not always known to every participant so as teams keep trying and
not succeeding, the frustration builds. But just like any challenging
puzzle, once it is conquered, a feeling of pride and satisfaction
replaces the frustration.
Think about the old Rubik’s Cube from the 1980’s. That one puzzle
caused a lot of frustration, but once people started to solve it, they
got fantastic pride out of sharing the “secret” with their friends who
were unaware of the solution. Every time the secret was passed from one
person to the next that pride of accomplishment passed with it. The
same thing can actually happen in a good team building event as well.
Regardless of what type of team building activity you decide on, make
sure to focus most of your time on keeping the energy high throughout
the event. Use activity to insert energy into your meeting. Organize
the activities to try to keep everyone involved all of the time. And
finally, create some type of emotional memory during the event so that
at the conclusion, participants say, “That was a lot of fun! I’m glad I
participated.”
Note :
Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s
Institute Team Building and the inventor of many world-famous team
building events like the Build-A-Bike Charity Team Building event and
the Camaraderie Quest High-Tech Scavenger Hunt. His team of expert
facilitators conduct events for groups as small as 20 people and as big
as 10,000 people.
http://www.selfgrowth.com
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