Let's talk today about some positive team-building activities that you can
use with your team. I get hired all the time to go to a group or a team to do a
conference or a breakout session where we get to do team-building activities.
And the key here is to get people engaged. Get them interacting with each
other so that they're not just sitting there like lumps on a bump and passively
experiencing the training. You can set the tone for a powerful team training
experience by starting it off with interaction. Get them up, get them
interacting with each other and I love to start out with introduction
activities. There's a couple of ways to do this. I like to pair people off, have
them interview each other for maybe a minute each and you have to give some
guidance to this because if people are kind of shy or introverted then they're
not really looking toward interacting with people, there might be a little bit
of resistance. So I like to pair them up and then give them a specific task like
interview the person that you're with, you'll have 1 minute and then I time
them on my watch. You'll have 1 minute find out their
name, where they grew up and something obscure that most people in this room
would never know about them. And so that gives them a way to structure this
interview and then after a minute call time, alright, now switch and the other
person introduces. And then depending on the size of the group, if you've got 20
or less for example, have everybody gather in a circle after the interviews,
after the call time and then have each person introduce the person that they
interviewed. Not themselves. This gets people talking and it starts to break
the ice in a way that set the stage for other activities that
are to follow. Now, as we get into the training mode of a team meeting, think
about your own role. If you are the facilitator of this training or if
you're the CEO or if you are a company hired trainer or whatever your role is,
let's shift from sage on the stage to guide on the side. Are you good with that?
Sage on the stages where you've got all the answers. Everybody shut up and listen,
I'm going to talk to you for about an hour and a half, you take notes. alright?
Yeah, how does that sound? You want to sign up for that as an audience member?
Not really. You're going to be on your phone, you're going to be scrolling through your
social media, you're going to be checked out of the meeting and into whatever you can
think of to distract you. Guide on the side. Instead of sage on the stage means
that you're going to be off in the wings somewhere and you're drawing on the
brilliance of the group. I believe this that most teams that you might have an
opportunity to train including your own, already have some brilliant answers. We
just need to facilitate and draw that out of them. So the activities that we
bring to the training can help to facilitate that. You can do a quick
google search on team-building activities and you can find some good
stuff. There's a lot of resources out there. Some of the traditional ones
include a group task. So you divide the group into groups of 4 or 5 people
and again, depending on the size of your crowd, you can you can gauge this
according to the size of the group. One of my favorites has to do with tower
building. Now, there's a traditional activity that you build a tower using
marshmallows, dried spaghetti noodles and masking tape and that's fun. But it's
maybe a little overused it shows up a lot. One of my colleagues, Kirk Weisler,
shared an idea with me where he uses Jenga blocks to build a tower but not
only does he have the group build that Tower they can with a set of Jenga
blocks, he goes around beforehand and has everybody close their eyes and in each
group, he touches the shoulder of one person, that person is designated as the
saboteur. The person who is going to try to sabotage this group but they don't
reveal to the group who it is. This changes the dynamic and it gets
some really interesting conversation going afterwards as one person then in the
group is silently trying to sabotage the group. He also gives them ways to
eliminate the saboteur from the team. They can vote them off with a consensus
vote. You can structure this any way that you want but maybe that gets you
thinking about some variations of a common activity, build the tallest tower
that you can with this group of materials that we give you. In this
activity, as is true in any team-building activity, probably the most important
part is the debrief. So once the activity is completed, we gather around and again,
depending on the size of your group, you might have to divide into subgroups if
it's a large group. But if you've got 20 or less, just get everybody in a circle
and talk about the experience. What did you notice? And then be quiet, okay? You
zip it because you're the guy down the side,
you're not the sage on the stage. Draw it out of the team.
What did you notice? 9 times out of 10, they're going to notice things that you
didn't and everything that you did. So let them talk and and they'll bring up
things, "Oh, I noticed that the saboteur on our team was just making it hard for
everybody to communicate." Okay, well what does that have to do with the team
dynamic? And you can ask questions to facilitate that conversation but draw it
out of the team. This is the learning portion of the activity. The activities
are fun and they will reveal dynamics of the team. They always do. take the time to
draw out from them. That's true of any
activity that I talked about. Let me give you a few other favourites that have
come up for me. One of my most recent favorites has to do with this game. Some
of you are probably aware of this. You can pick this up online, Amazon, it'll sell
you anything. Spot it is what this game is and it's a
depth of round cards and you make things the thing about these cards is that any
2 cards you draw from the deck will have one and only one item that matches.
So if you look at these cards what item is the same on both cards? Well, it's that
red maple leaf. Do you see it there and there's only one match. Well that's true
of every card. If I draw another card, it might be the yin-yang symbol or the
zebra that matches but every card has one and exactly one match. Well, this
facilitates some really interesting team interactions. You can use this for
introduction games for example. I went around to an IT group that I was
training just last week. I gave everyone in the group one of these spotted cards.
So everybody's holding their own card. They walk around the room and as they
encounter another person, they counted off, okay? 1, 2, 3, they put their card
down and then the first one to identify what's the same on those two cards, gets
to interview the other person about their most embarrassing moment or about
something that the group doesn't know about them or about something that
reveals something that's interesting about that person. They get to be the
interviewer if they win the match and then after the interview, they go off to
the next person. Now chances are, they're going to be interviewed in the next one
and so we do that for a while and then after it's gone on for a while, we gather
in a circle and I have people share the most interesting things that they heard.
It's hilarious, it's fun. It gets them interacting. Here's another one and this
one again was shared by my friend and colleague Kirk Weisler, he said you take
the spotted card and you go around and and
you interact with someone else, you do the same thing. 1,2,3 go and then
you whoever identifies the match first, wins the other person. So they take their
card, they get in line behind them, now they go and they find another pair or
single or triple group of people and the first person in the line for each faces
off. Now, as this happens, the line gets longer and longer and pretty soon you
have two lines walking around the room and they meet and face off. This game is
called "Eat the Dragon" and whichever dragon wins, you know there's cheering
and things like that. But this gets people interacting with each other.
Spotted, powerful tool for positive team-building games.
Another one of my favorites is to play Improv games. One of my friends, Izzy
Gazelle developed an app. It's called Improv 4 you with the number 4. Go
download that on your phone and look at some of the ideas I think you shared
about 10 different games there that you can do improv fashion with a group. One
of my favorite improv games to do is called The World's Greatest Expert. This
is where the group gets to designate that a person who's chosen as the
person of focus is the world's greatest expert on and then you pick something. So
it might be fish in the Columbia River. It might be ballet shoes, it could be
anything. But the group chooses some obscure subject and now the person who
is selected and I like to start usually with a c-level executive in the company
or one of the leaders of the team. That person is the world's leading expert on
ballet shoes then everybody in the group gets to ask them any question they want.
And they in traditional improv fashion, will totally make up an answer if they
don't know the answer but present it with confidence. This gives you a chance
to practice a lot of interesting skills. It's hilarious, it's funny, it's
fun. After several questions then the world's greatest expert gets to
designate the next world's greatest expert. The group picks a topic and we're
off to the races with the next round. Another improv game that I like to play
divides people into groups of 3 or 5. I like to use an odd number for a
specific purpose and it's called the -yeah but - yes and game. You play two
rounds where you pick a topic, it might be plastic reusable water bottles for
example. But it could be anything and the first person in the group will say, "Well,
plastic reusable water bottles are whatever, they're great. They're useful." I
love them. Whatever that person wants to say. The
next person in line says, "Yeah, plastic water bottles are whatever the first
person said." But and then they say whatever they want to say. So the pattern
is yeah, paraphrase what the first person said but and then add what you want to
say. That goes around for a couple of turns until everybody's had a chance at
least once. And then we do round 2 which is exactly the same except we
change the wording and you'll pick a different topic. So maybe the next topic
is electric cars, President Trump, whatever. You pick whatever topic it is.
The first person states their their position, second person says yes instead
of yeah, paraphrase is what the first person says and then they add their
piece to it. Totally different dynamic. Run that through twice and then have a
debrief. People learn a lot from the yeah but yes and game. There are so many other
ideas and resources. I've just shared with you here a few of my favorites to
get people interacting with each other and to draw out the brilliance of the
group. There are a lot of great resources
available and you can use your own creativity to adapt those to the group
that you're working with. I'm sure glad that you found this video and that you
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comments. If you want to shoot some of those over to me, I'm just honored to be
on your team. Thanks for being here.