The Best Team Building Activities for Creating Cohesion and Connection

As a connector, educator, and leader, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the top universities and educators in the world to help them build their teams. Over time, I’ve found three team building activities that consistently and reliably work to build connections and create a stronger team. In this post, I’m going to share these activities and show you exactly how they can benefit your team.

Activity 1: Comfort Zones

The first activity that I love involves movement, which engages the brain and gets people thinking and reasoning. It’s also great for getting the right people into the right conversations. The activity is called Comfort Zones.

To begin, designate three zones – comfort, growth, and panic – and create a physical space that represents each of these zones. Choose a series of prompts that will be fun, engaging, and relevant to the purpose of the team building activity. For example, ask the group to imagine a six-foot black rat snake brushing against their leg and to move to the comfort, growth, or panic zone based on their reaction to this scenario.

Quickly move into more topical prompts like: “move to where you would be if you needed to inform a colleague that they were being let go.” Or something that might be related to your groups’ values or a common dynamic like: “Move to the space you find yourself when you are in a meeting, but you don’t actually know why you were invited.”

The goal of this activity is to get people to make honest choices about where they feel comfortable and to use geography to get the right people into the right conversations. Now just moving and standing around doesn’t start those conversations.

Part two of this is essential. Once everyone has voted with their feet for a specific prompt, offer a specific question or prompt for people to jump into conversation with 2-3 other people around them. Example prompts include:

• Pair up with somebody near you to swap a story that comes up related to this dynamic.
• Get into groups with people in a different zone than you and share what informed your choice to be in the panic, growth, or comfort zone.

Keep in mind, you do NOT need to spark a conversation after every prompt. In fact, I like to only get people into conversation when I see a dynamic that is particularly intriguing. You’ll know this because the group will begin to whisper or chatter without any prompting at all. This is a good sign that the dynamic is worth debriefing a bit.

Activity 2: We! Connect Cards

The second activity that I highly recommend is called We! Connect Cards. These are a set of 60 questions that have been researched and tested to accelerate connection and trust as quickly and comfortably as possible. The questions are broken into categories, including self-reflective, fun and light, and deeper questions.

One of my favorite exercises to do with We! Connect Cards is called 60 Removal. Lay out all 60 of the questions on a table and invite the group to remove every question that they feel confident they could answer for everyone else in the group.

One time I led this exercise with a group of folks that had worked together for a minimum of 8 years and they could only remove 6 out of the 60 questions. This alone was extremely insightful and they decided to start the rest of their weekly staff meetings that year with one of the 54 remaining questions.

This exercise is an effective way to build new strands of connection and communication, even for groups that have worked together for years.

Activity 3: Curiosity Ping Pong

The third activity that I recommend is called Curiosity Ping Pong. This exercise encourages a culture of team building that can be woven throughout your team’s daily interactions. To begin, choose a question and invite everyone to respond in a quick way where everyone can speak at once.

Then, invite the group to follow their curiosity and ask follow-up questions to other participants’ answers. This exercise creates a memorable moment for the group that encourages learning and connection, and creates shared experiences and memories that can be referred to in the future. Perhaps most importantly, this exercise rewards curiosity and is extremely participant led. That means the group can guide the content of their conversations even if you start with a question like, “What is one of the most meaningful affirmations that you have received?” After hearing a response, somebody may follow up with, “How did you first meet that person?” And that’ll reveal elements of their life and values that go far beyond the original question.

Creating a Culture of Team Building

While all three of these team building activities are effective on their own, they can also be used in combination to create a culture of team building within your team. This approach encourages learning, connection, and collaboration on an ongoing basis, rather than just at specific intervals throughout the year.

By using these team building activities, you can become a better connector, educator, and leader, and help create a team that is cohesive, connected, and successful.

Free Resources

To help you get started with these team building activities, I’ve created a free digital version of We! Connect Cards that you can download. Additionally, you can download our free connection toolkit or purchase a physical deck of We Connect Cards to use with your team.