What’s the objective of team building activities? This is a question that you might be asking as you’re watching this video and searching for this video, but it also is a question that participants of team building often ask. What is the point of this? What is the point of team building?
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In this blog, I’m going to unpack 3 common and core purposes of team building exercises which is useful to put them into buckets so that you can be intentional. Now, the real purpose of a team building activity though is it depends. It depends on why are you actually doing any sort of team building in the first place. I’ll also be able to offer a frame that will help you create and build more intentional and purposeful team building experiences for your group.
3 Common and Core Purposes of Team Building Exercises
Here’s the facilitator’s answer to “what is the objective of team building?” It depends, truly. Well, that’s actually the facilitator’s answer to everything is “it depends.” “It depends, it depends on the context, depends on the-” which is probably the most accurate answer. As somebody who’s concrete- I like to know like, “All right, give me something here.” I’m gonna offer some common, 3 very common purposes or objectives in team building. I put a little, tiny, miniature book together called “The Pocket Guide To Facilitating Human Connections.”
Experiences
In it, the front 3rd is kind of a little, micro, master course in how to create really engaging experiences. Experiences, not just dialogue and not just conversation. The back two-thirds are 20 different exercises that you can do with groups in a variety of contexts. And they’re lumped into these 3 categories so the 1st category is connection activities. People, when they say the word team building, oftentimes mean, “I really want my team to just connect. They’ve been working really hard. I want everybody to just relax have a good time, connect with each other. I know it’s so important to culture- to just have people connect.” That’s what they mean, maybe, when they say “team building.” Weand.me/free id where we actually give away 20 plus exercises that help teams connect, build that culture of belonging and trust in a group. Now, the 2nd category, and this is an interesting one because I have a lot of clients who come to me for this purpose of team building activity but it’s a little bit funky.
Communication and Cooperation
People want to do team building to improve the way that people communicate and cooperate within the organization. Now, the reason I say it’s funky is typically what that means is the boss reaches out to me and sends an email through our website and says, “Hey, can you facilitate a team building session? There’s some issues in my group, I want to get better communication and cooperation.” Something like that. “We want to collaborate better.” Sometimes what that means is there’s some problematic group dynamics that I don’t want to deal with so, can you fix them for me? Which is, depending on the group. It depends but can I fix them for you? It depends. It really does depend on the severity of the issue. It depends on is this a, you know, is this about a 10-year ongoing problem or cultural dynamic? or is this just something you’ve added 5 new team members and you want to get better at communicating? One of the reasons that team building is so effective at improving communication is that it’s an entrepreneur language. It’s like working on the business rather than in the business. When you’re working in the business, if you make pies to use the pre-proper book, the e-myth example. If you make pies and all you’re doing is making pies, you can’t focus on how to scale up your business or how to do things smarter, more efficiently, etc. It’s the same thing in an organization. You’re working in the business, you don’t spend time thinking about how you communicate with each other and what the dynamics between collaboration and cooperation are.
Team building as an objective can be time set aside to work on the business, to work on yourselves as a team. To establish communication norms, to improve upon communication norms, to slash out bad communication norms, to increase or decrease the distance between collaboration and cooperation so that that work can happen and flow more quickly between each other. You realize like, “Oh my gosh. Like I’m sending this pdf to this person who’s sending it to this person who’s sending it to this person to sign to then send back to this person to this person to this person so that I have the signed document.” It was like, “Wow. If we do team building really well, we just like cut that nonsense out and speed up that process by about 4 days and 7 back and forths.” That might be an objective or a purpose to team building. The final one, and as I’m sharing these 3, they kind of increase in depth, right. Connection activities, easy to do. Ask some questions, create connection before content, my channel is filled with ways and methods that you can meaningfully build that cultural connection small bites at a time.
Building Trust
This last one, building trust is a little bit harder. Take this for example, if I said to you right now, “Leave your computer screen and go build a relationship of trust with 3 strangers.” What would you do? How would you do it? What would the process look like? Yet in an organization, we’re kind of forced to do that, but typically what happens is onboarding happens. Somebody comes in they’re like, “Hey. Welcome. Blah blah blah, meet these people.” Down to work, work. Make those pies, make those pies, make those pies. If you’re in a great organization or a place that’s on the great places to work list, maybe trust is really built into the process and people are really deliberate about the questions that kick off meetings, and the way that cultural values are framed and that builds trust. They’re deliberate about transparency so that you don’t feel like you’re like treading through like trying to figure everything out like you just- what people say is what they mean and what’s written what is meant and there’s that trans- level of transparency and that increases the level of trust.
An objective for you might be increasing trust. Unfortunately, more often than not, in the field of team building, we do team building to mend broken trust and unfortunately it exacerbates it. It makes it worse, right. Going and like building some object together or going and building a bike or going bowling together or doing an exercise over Zoom to really connect with somebody who you have a massive broken trust with is probably not gonna solve that issue. For me, mending broken trust shouldn’t be an objective necessarily for team building. That should be an objective for a difficult conversation. That’s a whole other category, there’s another book all about that in terms of how do you ask powerful questions and create conversations that matter, not how do you like build this experiential, fun team development vibe because if you’re trying to do that, and somebody’s trust is broken like you can’t just fix trust with an activity, right. Trust is something that runs very deep, especially if you’re somebody who’s had your trust broken in life, in personal context, it’s harder for you perhaps to build trust professionally and so when it’s broken professionally, it’s that much harder to earn back, right. Trust is built incrementally, not all at once and that’s really important to know. The metaphor I like to use is “If I wanted to lose 10 pounds, which I wouldn’t hate, I am not going to go to the gym tomorrow for 12 hours. I’m going to maybe go on a walk in the morning for 20 minutes and maybe go on a run in the evening or a swim or, right, small incremental bits every day or almost every day that’s what builds health.
The same is true for what builds trust. Little bite sizes of connection and communication and cooperation work, ultimately build that trust. I encourage you to think about team building in 15 minute increments rather than 500 minute, like all day team building event. If you want to do an all-day team building thing, cool, totally fine, like go out as a team, celebrate, connect with each other. There’s something really valuable about having that unstructured time to build your team also. But, don’t make that the once a year thing that you do and then the rest of the year you just make pies, make pies, make pies, keep making those pies. If that reference doesn’t make sense to you, you should rewind and check out the other 3 pie references made in the video. If you like this, you will like this box. There is- this box weighs weight and has things in it that cost money, but there’s a free digital version in the link below so, if you want to access on this, there’s a whole bunch of tools to amplify, connection, belonging and trust in your group. There are activities, there are ways to do it from a difficult conversation perspective but also from an activity and fun, connecting perspective as well. This box is jam-packed with lots of value. If you want the actual box in your hands because you’re a team building nerd, or this is something you’re tasked with at work, you can check the links in the description to pick up this box as well and get it shipped to your house, apartment, car or drone. Have an awesome day.