team work

Be it a soccer match, a classroom project, or a business deal, it is only as successful as the team behind it is. Having a strong team with ambitious team leaders, cooperative members, and an undying team spirit not only keeps the members motivated and interactive, but it also breaks the barriers between mindsets to promote their creativity and problem-solving skills. Benefit from the following team builders in order to get involved into exciting and interactive team building exercises within your group.

Consensus

An excellent exercise aimed at team building and teamwork, Consensus promotes the importance of unity, agreement and compromise among all team members. This team builder can be especially effective in school trainings or student leadership sessions.

Easy to execute, without any material or space requirements, the activity requires all participants to split up into smaller groups of 5-6 people and cluster together to agree on a particular noise and action to perform for other teams. Once each group has demonstrated their act twice, the facilitator should allow them to huddle once again to recall all groups’ acts, and prepare themselves for a collective performance of with all the teams. This activity holds an objective for all the teams to keep regrouping, and repetitively attempt a collective act to ultimately do the same noise and action together, without any consultation between the teams.

After the activity, discuss and debrief the participants on their difficulties to reach a consensus, whether they needed any leadership intervention, their frustrations due to the communication barriers between teams, and any compromises that they had to make to reach an undivided final outcome.

Walk Together

As the name suggests, this activity requires all team members to walk together, but with their ankles tied to each others’. An idyllic team builder for building group trust, team cooperation and problem solving skills, a Walk Together activity works best for both students and employees.

Owing to its mobile nature, it is best to employ this team building activity in open spaces without any obstacles. Start by splitting a large group into smaller ones with no more than eight people each. While cloth strips or masking tape may be ideal, you may simply ask the participants to use their shoe laces to tie their ankles to both their neighbors’. The idea is to challenge the whole team to devise a strategy, coordinate with each other, and trust each other’s instincts to successfully walk together towards the finishing line, without any team member falling.

Once you have a winning team, gather all participants to discuss how they felt about their teammates during the activity, whether they helped or hindered each other’s progress, and what kind of collective effort and cooperation was required to be successful at the task.

Scavenger Hunt

An immensely proactive and competitive team challenge, scavenger hunts are timeless classics among team builders. The material and space requirements are individualized; however scavenger hunts are mostly carried out in several locations due to the ‘hunting process.’ Facilitators and trainers devise a plan where participants are split into groups and each group is handed a list of tasks to accomplish in a limited time span and under some specific rules and conditions. Teams are given points on their achievements, punctuality and penalized for any rule violations. Scavenger hunts have proven, time and again, to be a very sporty and exciting way to promote leadership skills, team bonding, team work planning, and coordination among the members.