Are Your Team Building Efforts Effective?

Whether you’re a team leader or a team member, you can probably list lots of examples of team building activities that have been completely worthless or a waste of time. Before you invest one more dollar into any sort of team development this year, there are a couple of things we want you to make sure are included. If you find yourself constantly pounding your head against that proverbial wall in frustration, there might be a couple of things that you’re missing. 

In this episode, we share some simple things that will help you invest in better team building this year, and hopefully avoid wasting all of our time.

Four Concerns About Team Building

How do you make a team building activity purposeful? How do you make it meaningful? We’ve identified four concerns to address before investing in team development.

1. Wasting Time

Wasting time is everyone’s concern. The person creating the opportunity for team building is often wondering if they are wasting the time of their peers. Additionally, everyone invited to the team building activity is likely thinking to themselves, “this better not be a waste of time.”

2. Knowing Where to Start

A lot of leaders don’t know where to start when it comes to investing in team-building activities. Sometimes, knowing where to start is getting clear on the purpose of what the team building exercise or event will be. Sometimes knowing where to start is getting that purpose statement, getting clear about the objective or what you actually want from a takeaway, and then reverse engineering.

3. Accountability

How do you sustain change? Accountability is often the fear of doing all the work to maintain ongoing change. This is a big concern for leaders.

4. Sustainable Change

Think about the levels of engagement between people. Team leaders and team members want sustainable change that will transcend the actual day or moment of a team building activity. The ability for a person to really understand how change is going to stick is also determined by their ability to break that change down into smaller steps that can be accomplished in shorter periods of time.

Three Things to Include in Team Building Activities

Include these three things in your next team building effort to help create sustainable, lasting changes that actually stick.

1. Clear Strategy

How do you engage your team around specific content and how is it consistent over time? Team development isn’t a strategy, it’s part of a larger organizational strategy. Team building and development will last if it’s part of a larger fabric of the organization or culture.

Think about how team building activities can fit into your larger strategy. How do your team development efforts fit into a larger strategy for your organization?

2. Research-Based

What do you know to be true? How long has a certain challenge been going on? What do you know about your team leaders and members? What do you know about how a team responds to time-oriented change? How much do you know about your own context? Learning about your team will help you understand what type of team building activities they actually need.

3. Custom Solutions

We arrive at a custom solution based on your dreams and desired outcomes. We spend a lot of time asking clients to be clear with themselves on what it is that they want to accomplish or what their expectations are. With this information, we can help design a custom solution for their specific needs.

We want the people that ask us for help to dream into the best possible solution that they can dream up. We want to be a collaborator in helping to make that dream a reality. One of the things that we Excel in is the ability to create something unique and specific for each individual client built on a platform that we’ve tried and tested for years.

Are Your Team Building Efforts Effective?

If employers spent more time investing in their people in ways that were purposeful, team members would be happier, more fulfilled, and have a greater sense of meaning in their work. Start with your team, make the investment, and see what great things can happen. If you have questions about anything you heard in this episode, or want to talk to us about how to do purposeful team building with your team, send us an email to connect@leadershipvisionconsulting.com. We’d love to hear from you!