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If you wish to play an office prank on your colleagues then just try walking into the office and mentioning in passing that there is a company team building event planned soon. The looks of horror will cascade around the office as your colleagues picture the trust falls and group chanting in a secluded field somewhere around Dorset.

Although his is an exaggeration, many employees are subjected each year to company team building events which include various hellish pursuits such as role plays and colleague bonding. In fact so many companies do it that it has developed into a multi-million pound industry catering for everything from a day out at the races to its a knockout family fun days.

In the midst of all the psychosomatic testing and complimentary Danish pastries lies some carefully over-complicated theories which this article intends to make a bit clearer. There are many different schools of thought however this article will use the definition that team building is the process of creating a collaborative enterprise that can perform or effect change.

We all function in groups, however what makes a group of people a team and furthermore, what makes a team good or bad? Have you ever been dragged into some makeshift and invasive psychometric testing asking the question, what possible use can this have? The answer is that the psychology of individuals in a group dictates how set group functions as a team.

A popular framework for this is the Sixteen Teamwork Complexes which is based on the psychoanalytical theories of the renowned Dr Karl Jung. The framework uses the Jungian theory of psychological types and facilitates the pre-emption of differences between the individuals personality, work persona and preferences.

The theory revolves around the overall team function relying on a balance of various roles. A fun game is to look around your office and guess which function your colleagues are performing. Are they a crusader or explorer, a scientist or an innovator? All these team functions can be underused or overused in the group dynamic creating a dysfunctional team.

Let us take for example a team role labelled coach. Then let us define this as one who assess other team members involvement in a task and to contemplate how to gain the teams involvement and commitment to a certain task. The underuse of this role will result in a team working as a group of individuals and the overuse will result in team members being fearful of disagreeing with each other, either way resulting in a dysfunctional team dynamic.

There are eight different psychological types and an underuse and overuse projection for each, creating the Sixteen Teamwork Complexes. The task is identifying who performs which role in the team and whether that individual is underusing or overusing that role. In order for this to be effective an overall team goal is essential.

We all joke about the office stickler, whose obtrusive lust for inflexible deadlines and documentation can become disruptive to your day, or the office whirlwind who disrupts the office doing everything at ludicrous-speed, well this framework identifies these overuses within a team with foresight to correcting and therefore streamlining the team dynamic.

There are many companies on the web who offer training and solutions to your team building issues. Much of the time it is members of senior management who are effecting the team dynamic with overuse of their team roles, so next time a team building event comes up do not role your eyes as it could make your office environment that much smoother to work in.

Shaun Parker is a leading team building consultant with comprehensive experience in management consultancy.

Team building has been around as a corporate training technique for decades, but recently it’s fallen into disuse. Why? Because many of the techniques of team building seem more like play than work, perhaps.

Or because managers decided that the team building they’d already done was enough to make the group cohesive and maximize their productivity.

However, team building is a continuing process. As the military has found in decades of trial and error, when you have units of people playing and competing together, they grow closer, start thinking as a group instead of as individuals, and find it easier to work as complementary parts rather than as units.

Communication improves. And almost like magic, a bunch of people are transformed into a functioning team.

How Team Building Works

Great team building exercises use a variety of techniques to build group cohesion. Communication is an essential part of team building, as are group focus on a single goal that requires strategy to accomplish.

Often, but not always, it helps to have separate teams competing against one another.

One especially effective method is the scavenger hunt. The manager conducting the team building exercise takes into account the individual strengths and weaknesses of each team member and includes challenges that will exploit both of these for each member.

Team members have to work together at times to accomplish certain goals, like using landmarks that different members are familiar with as markers for the hunt. And the reward at the end must be applied equally to all.

Paintball is used by the military to bring units together. This exercise requires not just physical fitness and good aim, but the more important and hard to train skills of strategic thinking, communication, and learning to bond.

While the sport is a little rough and tumble for many offices, it can be a great teambuilder for the right group.

Other great team building exercises can include things like round-robin quiz games, word puzzles, and ordinary sports. That office softball team? It can be fun and also a great team builder.

Including Team Building Into A Meeting

Team building exercises are generally fairly involved and take a considerable amount of time. For this reason, they are inappropriate for most meetings outside of office half-day or full-day retreats.

For these longer meetings, get away from the office so creativity can flow and natural barriers are broken down. Start the meeting with something relaxing and positive, then move into the team building games.

Only after the team builders should you get into serious work. Why? Because fresh from the team builder, your people will work better together and find fresh creative ideas. You’ll notice an immediate result, and you’ll begin cementing those new bonds right away.

When To Use Team Building

Every office with numerous workers who frequently do not interact directly should look into using team builder exercises. However, there are a number of situations that almost require the use of team building.

For instance, in an office where there has been considerable friction or small groups competing in negative rather than positive ways, team building can break down barriers and create rapport where only strife existed before.

This is really excellent if you can do a contest pitting upper management with the people in cubicles, between whom a natural and healthy rivalry already exists in most cases.

Also, in offices with high turnover a regular team building exercise can build bonds that will help slow that turnover rate as well as improve interworking relationships for new and established employees.

In this case, team building exercises when your turnover hits a critical mass of 10-15% new employees can help bring the new people into your current corporate climate.

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Changing habits is hard work. It has been said that it requires 21 times of doing something in order to make it a habit. Here are some ways to figure out how to turn unhelpful habits into positives.

1. Never Feeling Good Enough - Are you constantly evaluating everything you do and generally finding fault. Do you have an internal voice which critiques you on everything, seeing only the negatives, not the positives? This voice is often described as a “gremlin.” When you are feeling not good enough it can show up by your being indecisive, relying on others to direct you, using language of uncertainty and even having poor posture. Generally there is a feeling of self doubt.

Clearly a change is necessary. First, you need to become aware of your limiting beliefs and in what situations they occur. What actions do you take which might be perpetuating these beliefs?

Sam was recently promoted to a managerial position and was both excited and scared about his new responsibilities. He knew that a lot of his colleagues were envious of his promotion, which added to the pressure he already put on himself. He evaluated and re-evaluated everything he said and did, to the extent that he was immobilizing himself. His “gremlin” was in high gear.

Sam worked with his coach to identify what he needed to change and what action steps were necessary. The result was his “gremlins” went into retirement and he had strategies in place if they returned.

2. Avoiding Conflict - You are by nature a peacekeeper. You like everyone to be happy and agreeable. The problem is that in life there is always some level of disagreement and conflict and how we deal with it can become the problem.

In the workplace, managers need to be able to manage conflict. Your team members will not always agree or like each other. They might not agree with you or like what you are telling them. What if their job performance is interfering with the goals of the company or the team’s morale? How will you deal with it? Avoiding conflict could be an obstacle to your taking on more of a leadership role.

Joyce disliked conflict, but recognized that if she wanted to be seen as a leader she would have to step up. She worked with her coach to develop a 3 step action plan.

1. Acknowledge the conflict.
2. Invite the other person to have a say and listen to their perspective.
3. Jointly develop a game plan for change.

Acknowledging out loud what a challenge conflict was for her, allowed her to “own” it and make changes.

3. Poor Boundaries - We have all known someone who has trouble saying “no,” and therefore might get into situations where they are doing more, but are stressed and unhappy about it. Sometimes people take advantage of them because of this weakness. Being able to set limits about what you can and can’t do is an extremely important skill. Assess your team. Is there someone who has trouble saying “no?” If so, what can you do to help them?

There are other issues which also fall under the category of poor boundaries: being aware of when, where and with whom you speak; the issue of confidentiality. What is the forum and policy for discussing client information? At some companies conversations may inadvertently occur in corridors or at restaurants where talk might be overheard by others. At times there can be a fine line between sharing information and gossiping. Your job as manager is to help create the guidelines and structure, so everyone is clear.

Changing habits is hard work. I’ve just discussed a few ways to help you figure out how to turn unhelpful habits into positives. You can do it, all it takes is 21 times of doing something in order to make it a habit!

Copyright 2007, Gail Solish.

Gail Solish, provides Executive/Personal coaching to managers, directors and executives focused on workplace development and relationship management.
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Although not really well known to the laymen, the term “Hawthorne effect” has resounded in the social science world since the late 20s in America. The Hawthorne effect is basically known as a study of how high worker morale equals better work output.

The morale is based a great deal on the social interactions between workers — more so than the actual type and quality of work that is being done. This will be a small touch on what some of the study found as well as some team building techniques that are used today that are popular.

The name “Hawthorne” does not come from the name of the scientist that conducted the study, but is actually the name of the company that the experiment was conducted on. In 1927 the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois was a stage set by scientists to watch a group of workers interact on the job over a span of about three years. The team of scientists was led by Elton Mayo, known as the father of the Human Relations Movement.

There were two parts to the study. First they conducted some physical and environmental pressures and changes to see the effects. Some of those tests were little odd touches to the room surroundings, such as shifting the room humidity and ventilation, piping in music and adjusting the brightness of the lights within the space of work to see how these variations affected productivity. But the most profound experiments were done on how each worker formed their group dynamic and how their group belonging resulted in what amount of work was done.

This test was done on workers who were building telephone relays at the plant. The measurement of production output was charted with all the environmental factors changing. But it was found that the small group’s ability to get along with each other and their immediate boss created a direct relationship to the output.

The Hawthorne studies deducted a lot of results that are heavily debated today, but it spurred the beginnings of team building and the importance of small group morale and how the automaton worker philosophy of yesteryear can only be taken so far. This postulated that acceptance in a group was probably the single most important factor in the group dynamic; and since we spend a majority of our lives at work, it was important to create a relationship not unlike a family.

Practicing to Get Along: Team Building Games

So what a lot of company executives have a tough time boiling down to is the concept of getting their employees to work with the most efficiency, balancing morale, or willingness to work out of joy and group acceptance from their work peers. One technique that has caught on recently is the team building exercise of corporate scavenger hunting. This is an example of breaking the body of workers down to groups.

The corporate scavenger hunt is one of many team building games that specifically engages each team member and extrapolates every skill type from nearly all group members. Scavenger hunts today are set up by organizations with serious intent for their team building clients. High grossing corporate clients like Amazon.com and Microsoft have launched hunts for various departments in the past.

Watson Adventures (http://www.watsonadventures.com/team_building.html) offers a unique series of corporate team building games by hosting scavenger hunts in many metropolitan areas across the U.S. The article was written by Art Gib, who is a freelance writer.

So the top executives want to find out what their workers can do by doing a little experiment that should be “fun” for everyone. You’ll probably get a bunch of rolling eyes. However the feedback can be quite valuable to find out the strengths and abilities of people to see how effective they are together. This is usually done through an exercise that takes the focus off of their daily routine and puts them in a realm where the most basic components of decision making and delegating are put to the test.

The team building event will usually involve various scene changes. Corporate adventure is another way of going about doing corporate team building by putting employees in an exciting, risk-taking adventure outdoors. Some corporate team building stunts go as far as whisking everyone away to a whitewater adventure to tackle a grade III rapid. Some are tamer than that, usually depending on what budget the company has and insurance policy (whitewater can be unusually ruthless on the accounting staff).

Some businesses seek something as exiting as an adventure series of team building that gets people interacting outdoors, but without the risk. A clever new adventuring game for team building is the scavenger hunt.

Bean Counting Cubicle Dweller to Sherlock Inspector

For those unfamiliar with the scavenger hunt, it’s simply a game that pits teams competing against each other. There are a series of clues that involve some type of critical thinking between each member in the group to find the answer. The answer will usually lead the group to a destination where another clue lies. The game will have the groups travelling within a range of different locales; some famous places for scavenger hunting are college campuses, museums or anywhere with distinct landmarks and geography. Eventually the final destination is reached by following each clue in sequence. The group that finds the final answer in the shortest time wins.

For those familiar, the sport of scavenger hunting has grown further than what you may remember as a child, or the simple clue seeking Easter egg find mission. In a corporate team building setting it would normally involve an emcee setting the stage and outlining the rules of the game. They would stoke the creative juices while putting up the parameters of the game. The organizers usually give clues on sequenced cards with written questions or photos for the group.

With a good scavenger hunt, questions do not center on a specific task where one person may be better than the other within the group. For instance, someone knowledgeable about the art pieces at the Museum of Fine Arts (if the hunt takes place there) will not necessarily have an advantage over someone who may be good at word games because the questions are varied enough to touch on many different skill sets. One could be trivia based, another could include a hidden anagram or a word may allude to a dual meaning that unlocks to reveal the answer.

Good questions typically ask varied and unusual questions that touch on such a variety of subjects that someone in every group will usually have an answer.

Art Gib writes for Watson Adventures (http://www.watsonadventures.com/corporate.html) who emcee and stage a variety of different private scavenger hunts for businesses. They have had many high profile corporations use their service for corporate team building outings.

This will be a brief discussion on some of the rationale companies use to decide to provide team building games for their employees and an example of scavenger hunting as the next new wave of exercise. The specific example of such an exercise will be for those in the Chicago metro area.

Sometime after the industrial boom, social awareness and unions gathered to protect the employees’ welfare. Companies and competition grew throughout the U.S. and more focus was directed within. Corporations saw a direct relationship between work quality and employee mental health and wellbeing. Large staffed businesses saw that there was value in boosting moral and recognizing the individual as well as the company as a whole.

There is a duality to the group that drives attitude. Employees both think as a whole and as an individual. However each attitude coalesces into a whole group thought. So each individual needs to be paid attention to. The catch is there is no real timely way of doing that. Enter the team building exercise where small groups do the work.

The Problems with Traditional Team Building Exercises

To pay attention to the individual while bolstering attitudes in a team building effort is done traditionally by creating groups first. Groups are given a task or goal to work towards in some form of rewards system — something to mirror an exemplary form of what should take place in the office under regular business constraints and working well doing so.

However, given some statistics based on a group dynamic, there will be individuals who will assume dominant personalities and tend to create an oppressive system that may alienate or marginalize some members. This is usually due to the rewards or the stakes that are involved. There are some exercises that are used to detach the reward system and focus more on the game at play while using everyone in the group as important talent. One of the techniques is the use of scavenger hunts.

The Scavenger Hunt Advantage: Team building in Chicago

Scavenger hunting in Chicago lends a wealth of opportunity, landmarks and history for an enriching experience. Many organized hunts will take groups through the neighborhoods hitting infamous locations and landmarks. The scavenger hunt is more than just a regular team building in Chicago exercise; it involves the interaction of team members — each and every one of them. The Hunt questions do not center on a specific task where one person may be better than the other within the group.

For instance, someone knowledgeable of the Chicago area will not necessarily have an advantage over someone who may be good at word games. The questions are varied enough to touch on many different skill sets. One could be trivia based, another could include a hidden anagram or a word may allude to a dual meaning that unlocks to reveal the answer. The questions can take them through downtown to the Sears tower, or over to Wrigley field, asking varied and unusual questions that touches on such a variety of subjects that someone in every group will usually have an answer for.

Team building in Chicago with a scavenger hunt provides great landmarks for game questions and also helps the workers know each other not by force but by simply having fun and getting out on the town. The corporation and workers reap social rewards such as:

- Socially lubricate the group communication
- Build teamwork naturally, unforced and fun
- Build lasting bonds between each other, they’ll have fond history together
- They’ll know more about Chicago and appreciate it more
- Gives them a great excuse to throw a party or meet for drinks afterward

Art Gib writes for Watson Adventures (http://www.watsonadventures.com/chicago.html) who organize and arrange scavenger hunts in major metropolitan areas. Team building hunts, like team building in Chicago metro, are popular with many top corporation executives.