How Can TeamBuilding be Effective?

Managers and leaders are encouraged to create procedures and policies that encourage people to follow proven “trails” to create a measurable outcome, maybe a sale, or a product.  

Mangers spend time working to make people be at their most effective.

How often do mangers, individuals, and teams push themselves out of their discipline?

How
often are individuals and teams given the opportunity to safely
practice pushing that comfort zone, to walk a different “trail”?

Once
a manager, individual, and team pushes past a comfort zone and
prescribed roles they then have the ability to view a procedure or
policy through a different lens.

This
change of lens empowers the team and manager to create policies and
procedures that can raise the effectiveness of those on the team. The
manager when pushed past a comfort zone may now see that the procedures
and policies themselves are an evolving and dynamic process, full of
synergistic solutions.

This
change of lens has the ability to illustrate that there is an abundance
of ideas and creative solutions to be seized upon, and all it takes is
changing you perspective pushing past the prescribed roles and comforts
of the daily routine.

Within a team building program participants are encouraged to do things that scare them, to push that comfort zone to create and connect new brain based synapses and discover new ways of approaching and solving problems.

 To empower yourself and teams to see people and feel experiences in a way that at one point seemed impossible. 

An example of something that is scary to participants does NOT have to be dangling off a rope 60 feet in the air on a ropes course.This has little to no applicable references to the work environment. An example of a brain based push past set limits can be a leader truly quieting and listening to the team.
To some leaders this is the change in lens that is needed.

 As leaders we tend to feel that our lens is clean and that others are the problem.
The
outside is the problem, pushing and opening yourself up to listening to
team members whether you are a leader or not is a frightening push into
discomfort. A leader may hear from their team that it is not the
outside that is the problem it is inside, the leader and the current
environment that is the problem.

An
effective and long term team building plan is to create an open
environment for team members to speak their piece have their voices be
heard and respected, while at the same time having commitment to the
success of the team.This can be accomplished and it takes work, a push
of the comfort zone of daily routine.

The brain and mental push past limits of comfort for leaders and managers alike is a more challenging zone to break.  

Several of us push physical limits, how many managers and leaders push their intellectual limits and team limits?

What an effective team building facilitator
is capable of doing is facilitating an environment to challenge these
intellectual limits. When the facilitator leaves, your team is smarter
and has new lens with an enhanced perspective on what the team is
capable of accomplishing!

Is your team and you ready to break comfort limits and achieve greater results? I have customized team building programs to accomplish just that - Physically and Mentally!

   -Michael Cardus is the founder of Create-Learning-Team Building, an experiential consulting organization