Team Building Facilitation
Team Building Facilitation
Just what is team building and how do you do it? There are more answers to this question than we can begin to describe. Although many of our clients are looking for team building as one of the outcomes from a strategic planning retreat or board retreat very few of them actually have a separate agenda item for team building. They believe, and we agree with them, that with the right process a lot of team building is achieved through the act of developing a strategy or resolving an issue. Furthermore, getting away from the office, and spending social time together over meals, or recreational activities, does a lot to build relationships without an elaborate “intervention”.
When you do want a dedicated agenda item for team building there are several approaches that we can recommend.
Appreciative Inquiry
This approach is built on the belief that it is better for people to develop their own model from their own experiences than to try and “teach them” someone else’s model. Most of us will have had experiences where we felt that a team was really working well together.
Using the AI approach we ask people to work in breakout groups and share these experiences with one another. It is tremendously empowering and uplifting to hear these experiences and to discuss what it was that people did that made that team so successful.
As we hear more and more stories we can start to build a model as to what it takes for a team to be successful, based on our own past successes. This leads smoothly to a discussion as to how we can do more of this in our current situation.
Team Building with Strengths Finder
In this blog entry, we describe how we use StrengthsFinder 2.0 to help as a team building activity. We have used it with many more clients since the blog post was written but the approach remains the same.
If you would like to discuss team building as part of a leadership retreat please contact Meeting Facilitators International. The initial consultation is always free.