Team building strategies and workplace effectiveness

Teambuilding

Team building can mean anything from improving communication skills and resolving conflict to setting up a self-directed work team (Nelson, 2006). When people come together for any type of project they all bring individual differences, beliefs, values and skills to the team. This necessarily results in conflicts among team members. Differences in terms of power, values, attitudes and social factors all contribute to the creation of conflict in teams (Townsley, 2008). Barriers to communication can be a major source of misunderstandings and includes things like poor listening skills, lack of sharing of information, differences in interpretation and perception, and ignoring or missing nonverbal cues (Townsley, 2008). Understanding why the team is in conflict is important to finding a solution and creating an effective team building exercise.

Team Building Exercise for Conflict Resolution

Role playing is an excellent team building exercise to help team members understand how to deal with conflict because it puts people in different roles than they are used to playing. This is designed to help people see things from other points-of-view. In this exercise teams of four people will be put together and given different scenarios to act out. Two team members will act out a conflict situation and one team member will be the mediator and another team member will be the observer. The mediator will not be given any materials, but will need to use their own skills and ingenuity to resolve the conflict between the other two team members. The observer is responsible for recording the main points of the role play. Once all team members have had the opportunity to be the mediator the team will debrief each other. The observer for each scenario will begin first and tell the mediators what they observed and then the whole team will discuss which members handled the situations the best and any other ideas the team members have that may have worked well to solve the conflict.

In order to implement this exercise it will be necessary to have the team members available for up to 2 hours so that no one is rushing through the process. A quiet room should be obtained where team members will be comfortable working on the exercise without interruptions or observation. The room should be large enough to accommodate everyone and glasses or bottles of water should be available. The team members will be told ahead of time that they will be participating in a team building exercise so that they can prepare their work accordingly and no one will be surprised, and possibly upset, by the change in their daily routine. This also gives the team members a chance to think about the team and reflect on any issues they may be currently having with other team members.

Once the preparations for the location are in place it will be necessary to create the role playing scenarios for the teams to act out. It's important that these scenarios have relevance to the team, so they should be realistic and mimic real conflicts that team members may encounter. Talking to supervisors, team leader, managers and human resources are good sources of information for creating the scenarios. The scenarios should be detailed enough that people who are not naturals at improvisation can still participate comfortably. The scenarios should include working situations that are similar to the team and incorporate the actual work done by teams at the organization.

When the team members have been gathered together the facilitator will explain what the exercise is about and everyone's role in the role play and how time available for the exercise and hand out the scenarios to all of the team members. The facilitator will make sure everyone understands what they are supposed to be doing and get people to their respective areas to begin working. The facilitator will not participate in the exercise, but will assist teams having trouble and answer questions. It will also be important for the facilitator to observe the team members and take down notes to reflect the participation or nonparticipation of members and to listen to the ideas that the mediators come up with to gauge the effectiveness of the scenarios.

Once the exercise has been completed the facilitator will bring all of the team members together and go over the exercise as a whole team. The importance of the exercise will be reinforced by asking the team to share what they learned. Team members will be praised for their efforts and innovative ideas to emphasize the importance of dialogue and communication in a team setting. Lastly the team members will be asked to complete anonymous feedback forms before leaving so the facilitator can evaluate the exercise and improve upon it.