Building The Perfect Team

Within corporate situations, team building has a tremendous significance. A well-functioning, united team of businesspeople and employees can work wonders for the various factors within a business and can impact the profits and assets held. There is no substitute for a solid team of workers that are united under a cause and, most of all, are actually enjoying their day-to-day work. With a few team building exercises and some time management training, any group of people can be turned into a tremendously successful team in no time.

Teamwork is a vital part of any corporate puzzle, of course. The field of organization development is dedicated to understanding this teamwork and attempting to provide as much information as possible to employers and employees about how to use teamwork to maximize effectiveness. There are a number of team building exercises that have been developed to aid in the process of building more effective, trusting teams.

Team Building Exercises

There are several team building exercises that can be completed by a group of employees or students. These exercises help develop trust, creative thinking, delegation of work, and cooperation skills. Most importantly to some, however, these exercises are also a great deal of fun.

Pictures within Pictures

This activity requires a series of pictures that can be related in some fashion to tell a story. Pass out one picture to each participant and explain that each person is holding a part of a larger story. It is the responsibility of the group to put the story together by putting the pictures in sequential order. Adding a time limit to the activity increases the tension and forces more reliability on each team member to communicate effectively.

There should be an ideal sequence to the story on a separate document that can be referred to. As the task is completed by the group, the sequence that the group came up with can be compared to the ideal sequence to determine how effectively the group worked as a team. It may even be a good idea to disallow speaking and other forms of verbal communication. This will force the group to rely on non-verbal communication and to develop other ways to solve the problem.

Survival

A great activity that helps team building is survival games. These are great for group communication and help with decision making. The activity also achieves the idea of priority making within the group. Essentially, a scenario is role-played in which there has been a plane crash or some sort of incident. The idea is for the group to decide on ten items to survive. Lists of ten items are given out to each group member, so it is the job of the group to file the list down to a total of ten items for the entire group, allowing each team member the chance to make their case for their items.

Dollhouse or Miniature Building

A final example of a team building exercise is the building of a dollhouse or another miniature. This creative exercise can be completed using as much or as little team structure as desired. Set a time limit and have the team put together the dollhouse within it. The team building exercise can be judged on whether or not the time limit was met and how correct the dollhouse assembly was.