Team-Building with a Twist

  Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

Are your team-building exercises actually creating a team? Fun activities are fine, but they don’t automatically lead to stronger communication, understanding and trust. Building a better team requires three basic elements: engagement, education and development — with a twist.

Project managers have a perennial dilemma: how can we educate, engage and develop our group in a substantial way that helps the team become better?

Team-building activities are often seen as the fun add-on to meetings devoted to status reports and deliverables. These can include a ropes course, golf, a trip to the desert, horseback riding, softball, a cooking school and the like. But are these experiences useful toward the goal? If the goal is fun, distraction or an open afternoon, then these experiences create shared memories and are often a welcome opportunity. But the goal is rarely just to have a fun afternoon.

Leaders want teams to trust better, to understand at a deeper level, and certainly to communicate with one another in useful ways beyond one afternoon. To do this, building a team requires three basic elements, and they are the same perpetual needs that all team leaders have: engagement, education, and development — with a twist.

Engagement with a twist

Sometimes it's simple — like a handshake — and other times it's complex — like securing …

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