Free Team Building Activities

By Solomon Masala | Team Building

Apr 04

Yes, free team building activities.  Are they worth it?  Yes, of course.  But first, let’s talk about why you’d even want to use team building activities.

We get asked this question often.  “Since we have all this work to do, couldn’t we just get right to the business at hand?”  It’s a fair question – why do team building if there’s work to do?

Researchers from the University of Central Florida and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense undertook a study to determine if in fact team building activities work.  Their results were positive.  We intuitively know that any process that gives a team more resources to deal with communication issues, become more innovative, and stay more engaged will ultimately benefit the work they do.

But talk alone does not change behavior; humans need direct experience to begin a shift in conceptual process in order to change.  This is where the right team building activities can have a deep impact on team performance and moral.

We believe there are 3 core reasons to use team building activities and to take advantage of our free team building activities ebook.
1) The Power of Metaphors
2) The Power of Multiple Intelligences
3) The Power of The Laboratory

Metaphors
Metaphors drive learning deeper by providing a direct connection to personalized relevance in the brain.  Team building activities provide a focused context for Metaphors.  Just think of a song that meant a lot to you in high school – for better or worse, it’s a metaphor that can can conjure up psycho-social states and take you right back in the experience, where learning occurred.

Multiple Intelligences
We absorb information through various ‘learning channels.’ The more channels that can be accessed in a learning process, the deeper and more thorough the information is taken, and retained.   Well designed activities provide a rich learning context where almost all of the 7 Intelligences can be accessed at once.

The Laboratory  
A Laboratory provides a concentrated learning context.  In ordinary life, humans will tend to steer away form situations that require more demand, especially when we feel we lack the skills to be as successful as we’d desire.  Thus, well designed team building activities will provide the perfect situations for the facilitator to observe behavior, offer the right coaching, and for the participants to practice the new skills.

We’ve provided for you on our site, an eBook PDF with free team building activities that we’ve tested and tried, and have found to be excellent for many situations.  Of course, it’s always important to know what your learning objective is before you use any team building activities – we’ll cover that in our next post!

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About the Author

Solomon is a trainer and consultant who works with organizations and teams in a graceful, energizing, and insightful manner - transforming the individuals and the whole. Inspiring, palpable and sustainable, positive change is always a result.