How to Make the Right Team

In cooking, each ingredient brings a unique taste or flavor to the dish. If you want your meal to be extra tasty, you add more sugar, spice or anything nice. This means, too, that you cannot put pepper in your beef stew and expect it to be sweet. You need to know how each ingredient will change or affect how your dish will taste. This is true as well, to members of a team. Knowing what unique contribution each member can bring is important to building an effective team.

There are several easy team building activities that you can facilitate in your team building sessions. These activities should focus on getting to know the members of the
team such as what their preferences are. You also need to ensure that the activities will allow members to maximize on their unique skills or talents.

The first activity can be a simple activity of asking the participants to answer questions like, what is your greatest achievement, what do you want to achieve in the next five years, what do you think are your strengths and weaknesses? The participants can share their answers to their questions in a speed-dating type of activity, so each can interact with as many members of the team as possible.

Another easy activity is “The Human Bingo” where participants can identify who in the group enjoys reading, carpentry work or repairing machines. They can also identify who can contribute to projects related to designing, music, psychology, travel or marketing.

Another easy activity for team building is asking the participants to build an object like a sailboat, using only the materials that the facilitator will provide. Their design and finished product should also withstand challenges that the facilitator will dictate, such as carry and protect a raw egg even after falling from a height of 4 feet or more.

Whatever activity you will choose, a team building activity should start with self-awareness and getting to know the members of the team better. The other activities that you will choose will depend on what you want to achieve for your team. Remember that the more the team can discover each ones unique contribution and talent, the better that than they can blend with each other.