Culture Leadership Charge – A Better Way to Build a Team

How many of you have done team building activities with work groups? We’ve all done events like bowling or tower building or trust falls.

How often, though, have those activities translated into sustained healthier work relationships?

Not very often.

Does that mean team building is a worthless endeavor? Not at all. Effective teamwork lies at the heart of most good things that happen in workplaces.

Teams with purposeful, positive, productive work cultures accomplish things that separate individuals cannot consistently deliver.

So, how can we create effective team building that contributes to sustained healthy relationships? By engaging with others in meaningful, cooperative activities away from the workplace and then leveraging insights gathered there into positive and productive work relationships.

The most compelling team building experiences use cooperative interaction.

I learned about cooperative interaction back in the ’80’s from Dr. Bill Michaelis, an educator, facilitator, speaker, author, play advocate, and good friend.

Cooperative interaction requires players to collaborate to solve challenges. Creativity and skills combined with cooperation are powerful! Together, those three generate great results, great respect, and great teams.

In today’s three-minute episode of my Culture Leadership Charge video series, I describe how Ken Blanchard modified a common team building activity – a team golf scramble – into a powerful learning experience by using cooperative interaction.

This is episode sixty-five of my Culture Leadership Charge series. Each episode is a short (two-to-three-minute) video that describes proven culture leadership and servant leadership practices that boost engagement, service, and results across your work teams, departments, regions, companies – and even homes and neighborhoods.

You’ll find my Culture Leadership Charge episodes and more on my YouTube and my iTunes channels. If you like what you see or hear, please subscribe!

Photo © Adobe Stock – bernardbodo. All rights reserved.

How well do team building activities your company offers actually translate to better teamwork on the job? Share your insights or questions on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.