Introduction to Team Building

Team building activities are stimulating problem-solving tasks designed to help group members develop their capacity to work effectively together. Many team building and initiative tasks are like kids games, others are novel, complex tasks and designed for specific needs. More elaborate initiative tasks can involve ropes courses, night-time activities, and exercises lasting over several days.

Team building activities are often used in meetings, presentations, workshops, training seminars, education programs, corporate training, with college, high, middle, elementary and pre-school school groups, sport teams, teacher training, youth work, and in therapeutic and correctional settings. Team building exercises can be adapted for virtually any setting, young or old, large or small, and across cultures.

Much depends on the role played by a facilitator. Different team building activities facilitated in different ways with different groups can and will lead to a wide variety of different experiences and different outcomes. In the hands of an excellent facilitator, even the simplest game can become a significant experience for participants; with a poor instructor, even the well designed activity can go awry.

An important part of team building exercises is participants' reflection and discussion about the activity, how they approached the situation, and possible points of learning. This is the processing stage of the experience. The idea of any team building activity is to transfer the learning experience to other parts of our lives.