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Team Building Exercise Ideas (Part 2)

The remainder of this article lists ideas for team building exercises for the athletic Arctic circle group, the academic group of Mensa members and exercises that can involve both groups and everybody in between.

Athletic Arctic Circle Group
No doubt these young men and women are eager to leave their desk jobs and get out into the fresh air for some exercise, so that’s exactly what we’ll do with them. A weekend in the country should be just the ticket, where they will be able to stretch their legs and impress colleagues with their hand/eye coordination, survival skills, sporting ability, grace under pressure and general sense of fair play. Exercises facilitating this include canoeing, windsurfing, yachting, rock climbing, scrambling, archery, clay pigeon shooting and camping.

To add a degree of competitiveness and bring people closer together it is worth dividing the participants into teams and setting a challenge where a level of cooperation is necessary to be victorious. Ultimately brains win over brawn, so you want to include a degree of strategy and planning that involves the appropriate use of limited resources, a tight control of time and necessitates individual members of the team pulling their weight equally.

Mensa Members Group
This group expects to be intellectually challenged, and the trickier and more elusive the challenge the better. A good exercise would be to make them create a coherent story from a set of images which have been distributed randomly. Each member has a picture but is not allowed to show it, necessitating their use of the powers of description and suggestion. Good levels of communication and the ability to understand things from another person’s point of view are necessary in order to recreate the story's sequence.

A similar exercise involves a scenario where a family restaurant has been inherited, but the business is very disorganised, with recipes written on torn bits of paper. Because the restaurant is due to relaunch with a grand opening that night, it is necessary to sort through the bits of paper to determine the ingredients and instructions for each recipe. Once again, good communication and management are essential to achieve a successful result. Your employees may be clever, but are they as good at listening to one another as they are at presenting their views?

All inclusive team exercises
Such games need to encourage genuine involvement from the entire group, not just participation from an enthusiastic few, so a broad range of skills are required to complete the task. Objectives include the development of team building skills such as successful time management, planning, negotiation, job delegation, problem solving and communication.

Obvious candidates for inclusive team building exercises include murder mystery weekends, straightforward orienteering adventures and river crossing and problem solving challenges that can involve every member of the team. One final factor about team building to keep in mind is that the full benefit of the exercises will only be felt so long as there is some sort of assessment carried out at the end of the day to determine how each member of the team has done.

This article should have given you a clearer idea of the things to look out for and consider when choosing your team building exercise. Now the only thing remaining for me to do is wish you the best of luck with your creation of a more unified workforce better able to communicate with each other and get along. In this regard, it’s amazing what a game of something as simple as musical chairs or charades can achieve. After all, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

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