3 Team Building Exercises for Camaraderie and Motivation

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 Comments 0
  Posted in Featured, Team Building

Here are list of 3 great exercises that can be used to build teams and have a lot of fun.  You may have experienced these in meetings, at corporate picnics, and even at high-dollar retreats.  Most of them can be done in any space with enough room for the people who’re participating to stand in, though.  Even inside the office itself, around the cubicles or on the front lawn.

Storytelling - Get on Google Images or Flickr and randomly pick pictures of any subject and type.  Print them out in large enough format that they can be shown to a group of 3-10 people, one at a time.  Then gather the group and go around in a circle showing a picture to whomever is next and asking them to come up with a sentence to ad to the storyline.  It might help if you have a starter for the group, to illustrate.  If the first picture can be “seeded” to kind of fit with the team’s project, that might help too.  The idea is to get the team working together to build a coherent story out of the pictures being shown to them in random sequence.

Group Juggling - Go to the store and buy some medium-sized, inflated balls or one of those plastic bowling sets.  Have everyone stand in a relatively open area (where things won’t get hurt) and hand each person a bowling pin or ball.  Have them “juggle” by throwing them to one another in any sequence or order they’d like.  As they get the hang of it, have them throw them the “long way” once in a while and tell them that they are not allowed to have more than one object in their hands at any time.  See how fast they can get the juggling going.  This is a lot of fun.

Mine Field - For smaller groups, this is a really fun one.  Scatter objects around a room, on the floor (pillows, pieces of paper, etc.).  Have one person blindfolded and a teammate must guide them through the room using only verbal cues (telling them to walk right or left, forward or backward, etc.) until the person is at the objective point.  It’s a lot harder to do than it sounds.

These are just a few little games you can use to build your team’s coherency.  These team exercises will not only show them how to coordinate together, but will also build camaraderie as they laugh and work together in a fun atmosphere.

Related posts:

1. Team Building For the Long Term