Corporate team building exercises, activities, and games

Team building exercises, activities, and games grow in popularity as versatile practical tools of team training and development.

A group of people put together does not automatically make a team. People need to at least get to know each other, to learn to get along and communicate, to develop interpersonal trust, to build the team spirit. They need to develop all the practical habits of functioning as an effective team in their every day activities. How to help them do that?

There is a number of team building approaches. On the one hand, each team member could take a formal course on how to work in a team in general. But this tends to be boring for many people, and will hardly build much cohesion within your specific team, will hardly bring any new practical habits in functioning of your team.

On the other hand, you could use full scale services of corporate team training professionals. But this may be an overkill for your particular situation or may just not fit into your budget.

In this situation team building exercises and team building activities may work as a more flexible and better targeted option.

There is a wide range of opportunities for team building exercises and games for practically any budget. There are professional consultants who help companies select and organize such events. Examples of popular and fun activities and games include road rallies, sailing regattas, snowboarding, fly fishing, interactive seminars, and on and on. The activities can be as simple and affordable as karaoke or as sophisticated and demanding as an African safari. There are books that put together many such kinds of team building ideas.

One common feature of many corporate team building exercises and events is that they put people into new challenging and fun situations that require much interaction between the team members. And sometimes the challenges can be tuned to focus on developing one or another team quality.

In particular, the team building activities can focus on improving communication, learning to take advantage of individual differences, learning to cope with change, learning to be supportive and appreciative, learning to put together creative solutions to nonstandard problems, or something else that the company considers important for its specific team.

Team building exercises seem to work better for some teams than for others. Some companies believe in them, some don't. There are also differences in opinions on the exact nature of the specific benefits of such events. Yet, they still stay as an irreplaceable tool in the today's team building toolbox.

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