Team Building Blog

I am quite certain that coworkers rarely utter the following words: "I don't like that person, she listens too much."

One of the most common complaints that people have about others is that they are ineffective listeners. How do you feel when others:

-Read their e-mail while you are speaking with them?

-Continually interrupt while you are talking?

-Jump ahead without hearing the full information?

-Demonstrate lack of concern through body language such, as looking away or rolling their eyes?

The most effective communicators recognize that a good part of their success is earned as a result of how well they listen. They have discovered the more they listen the more engaged others become in conversations and problem solving sessions. This, in turn, creates an environment in which communication flows and trust is developed.

However, trust from another person must be earned. Therefore, high levels of trust are determined not only by what you say, but also how well you listen to what others say. And listening is much more than hearing. While being hearing impaired is a physical condition, being listening impaired is self-imposed . Effective listening is a choice that requires attention, interpretation, and response to the other individual. All of these behaviors require effort. It is not surprising the Chinese symbol for listening is made up of three symbols: head, ear and heart.

Tips for Learning to Listen:

-Recognize your role as a listener - If you are too busy to listen attentively, choose another time for the conversation.

-Select an environment conducive to listening - Find a place with minimal distractions to increase listening effectiveness.

-Probe for understanding - Ask questions to ensure comprehension and convey interest.

-Paraphrase key statements and overall themes - This tactic builds alignment in thinking and ensures understanding.

-Demonstrate a comprehensive approach in your listening style - Learn to focus on big-picture themes, tune into specific facts and instructions, and empathize with the feelings of others.

Now hear this! Effective listening is a skill. Any individual that is truly committed to becoming an effective listener can develop listening skills. If you demonstrate strong listening skills, you might hear the people around you saying, "I really like that person. They're truly a great listener."

Imagine your team racing through the streets of New Orleans, wandering Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, searching for clues in the Museum of Natural History in New York City or exploring the Adventure Aquarium near Philadelphia, PA.

You don’t have to imagine any longer. Teambuilding, Inc. treasure hunts require serious brain power…and a serious sense of fun! Teambuilding, Inc. has been conducting treasure hunts for more than 22 years and we’re ready to share our extensive treasure hunt experience with your team.

Many team building activities are designed for small groups of 10-12 participants. Our treasure hunts are a blast for groups of all sizes.

Throughout your experience, you’ll solve puzzles that will help you navigate to your next clue. We probably already have a team building treasure hunt course at your zoo, aquarium, science center, museum or in your city. If you want to experience the next generation of treasure hunts, check out GeoQuest: The High-Tech Treasure Hunt. This outdoor hunt offers teams the opportunity to use hand-held GPS units to navigate from clue to clue. GeoQuest is powered by billions of dollars of technology…but it’s your own brain power that makes the difference.

Join us for an outdoor ZooQuest treasure hunt in the San Diego Zoo, an outdoor GeoQuest at the Arboretum in Dallas, historic Old City Philadelphia, Boston or in the eclectic South Beach just to name a few. We also have indoor ClueQuest treasure hunts at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Orlando Science Center in Orlando, Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington DC and at many other locations across the US. Participants regular say comments such as, “I’ve lived in the Chicago area for my entire life, and I discovered things about the city that I have never known before.”

After your team building treasure hunt, our skilled facilitators will conduct a debrief that is second to none. With more combined experience than any other team building company in the United States, we can link the treasure hunt to real world team dynamics and business issues.

We know how to create clues. Do you think your team can solve them?

It’s no secret that organizations that look to the future will be the future. Yet, few teams have mastered team building and the innovation process. To begin with, teams need Creators. These individuals think out-of-the box. They are not bound by current processes, products, or services. They make leaps in consciousness that ignites the fire of innovation.

Next up, the Advancers rally behind the best ideas and get people exciting about change. They consider the needs of the people and examine the implications of decisions on the employees and customers. The intuitively know that change will only take place if people support it…and they generate support.

Now it’s time for Refiners to have at it. Refiners make sure the these pie-in-the-sky ideas will really fly. They pose question after question. And if the innovative ideas can survive the scrutiny of the Refiners, you can bet they have merit.

Finally, the Executors create the plan to make it happen and put the pieces into place to implement the new innovation. This key phase of the process turns ideas into reality.

The model described here is known as the CARE™ model, an acronym for both the four roles and four stages of the innovation process that include the Creators who Create, Advancers who Advance, Refiners who Refine, and Executors who Execute.

Read additional free team building articles at: http://www.teambuildinginc.com/ei_news.htm

.Faster. Leaner. Every day, teams are challenged to do more with less…and I need it yesterday!

Studies are showing that workplace stress has reached new heights and it’s fairly obvious to recognize that higher stress levels increase the possibility of mistakes at work overall employee burnout.

So what’s an organization to do? Teams have been reaching out to Team Builders Plus for a one-of-a-kind workshop called, Team Samurai. This session allows participants to discover the power of the ancient practice of meditation

In this team building program, team members learn how to re-center themselves after a difficult customer interaction, ground themselves before making a presentation, or re-energizing when that mid-afternoon energy decreases.

For many years, I have been reluctant to combine my more than twenty years of meditation and martial arts experience with my eighteen years of team and leadership training in the classroom. But as I see heightened stress levels, I knew that the time was right.

The summer is a great time to get out of the office and enjoy a team building activity…as long as the weather cooperates that is. It seems that this year, Mother Nature has decided to keep us all on our toes. When selecting an outdoor team building activity for your team or organization, its important to ask your facilitator about rain back up plans. Teambuildingin.com offers four rain insurance plans to help ensure the day’s events go off without a hitch whether your taking part in a GeoQuest High-Tech Treasure Hunt or the latest philanthropic hit, Kindness Wins.

Its challenging enough coordinating everyone’s schedules and selecting the perfect day for the event, so why chance having your team building event washed out. Check out the rain plan options offered by Team Builders Plus.:

Option 1: No insurance
Option 2: Ponchos provided for each participant
Option 3: Alternative team building activity (determined with the recommendations of the facilitator)
Option 4: Rain date

We all have insurance on our homes and cars and especially for our loved ones. Why not insure your program to ensure that everyone has a fantastic time, regardless of the weather.

Have you ever been to a meeting that has spiraled out of control? You had an agenda. You defined a meeting leader and a scribe to take the minutes. You even had donuts (always a powerful draw to get people there). And yet, the meeting did not accomplish its intended objective.

One of the biggest complaints by managers is that they attend too many meetings. As Ashleigh Brilliant stated, “Our meetings are held to discuss many problems which would never arise if we held fewer meetings.”

Perhaps there would not be a need for so many meetings if the meetings that were held were conducted more efficiently. Many meeting leaders create agendas in which they define the topics that will be addressed. If they are wise, they define the amount of time to which each topic will be limited. However, they miss the next step, the most valuable step of all…they fail to define the nature of the topic in question.

Keeping the meeting on track
Every topic on the agenda should be designated in the following manner:

Level 1: Information – Provide updates, progress report, issues, etc.

Level 2: Discussion – Provide input and opinions on the topic

Level 3: Decision – Determine next steps and actions

Simply put, the most important function of the meeting leader is to keep people within the time limit for each topic and ensure the meeting does not spiral into a higher-level discussion. For example, meeting topics coded as Information are not topics for Discussion. Topics coded for Discussion do not need to achieve resolution by reaching a consensus Decision.

This is the key reason that meetings spiral out of control. Meeting leaders need to vigilantly enforce the level of interaction that takes place for each topic. It’s very easy to start discussing a topic that was purely informational. In fact, it happens quite innocently. One person interjects a one-liner. Another person replies with their opinion and before you know it, the Informational topic is a full-blown Discussion. The three-minute update has just consumed twenty minutes of the meeting.

It’s also just as easy for a topic coded as Discussion to expand into a lengthy conversation and even then, never reach a conclusion. The meeting attendees leave the meeting feeling like they did not accomplish anything, and yet, all the meeting leader wanted to do was take the pulse of the group on a specific topic. Pre-coding items allows people to feel like they have accomplished what they have set out to do at the beginning of the meeting.

Flexibility with conscious intent
When I share this strategy with teams whose meetings regularly spiral out of control, someone inevitable counters that sometimes, the nature of the information warrants a discussion. Or the group realizes that a decision is imperative, even though the topic was meant only for discussion.

Flexibility is the key. Meetings do not need to be so rigid that the meeting leader cannot adapt as needed. However, if a topic needs a higher level of interaction, make the decision consciously and adapt the rest of the agenda items accordingly. Perhaps, the group should stick with the agenda and either place the topic on the next meeting’s agenda or a special meeting may be in order to deal with that one issue.

Keep meetings on track
Most people know what it’s like to attend a meeting that has lost its focus… it’s frustrating and time-wasting. Keeping meetings on track takes energy and courage on the part of the meeting leader. Yet, in the end, meeting attendees appreciate a meeting that accomplishes its goals.

Despite what is going on with our current economic situation, most corporate groups understand the value of taking part in a team building activity. Goals of the team building activity have gone beyond showing appreciation, boosting morale and improving employee relationships. Many teams are utilizing the time dedicated to a team building activity as an opportunity to make a positive impact on their community.

Wheels for the World is a popular team building activity where the participants build bicycles and take part in challenges to earn the bicycle parts. The bikes are then donated to kids from United Way, Big Brothers Big Sisters and Boys & Girls Club, to name a few, and for many of the kids, its their first bike.

There is a new outdoor philanthropic team building activity called Kindness Wins. This is no ordinary treasure hunt. Instead of searching for hidden clues or caches, teams are let loose to make a positive difference. No good deed is too small and no act of kindness goes unnoticed. Teams earn Good Karma points by holding a door open for a stranger, returning something, such as a shopping cart, to its proper place, or by using a Post-it note to make someone’s day.

There are many more acts of kindness that your team will take part in and participants will also have the opportunity to create their own symbol of generosity and giving that will serve as a reminder back at work of what they experienced on this special day.

Combining a team building program with a philanthropic activity is a win-win for everyone, functionally, spiritually and mentally.

Corporate teams are jumping at the chance to explore next-generation treasure hunts rather than old-fashioned scavenger hunts.

According to Wikipedia, a scavenger hunt is “A game in which individuals or teams seek to find a number of specific items, or perform tasks, as given in a list. The goal is either to complete the list first, or to complete the list in the most creative manner.” Scavenger hunts are easy to organize and are great for school groups and social gatherings. No knowledge of the course area is required, as most of the items on the list can be found just about anywhere.

Treasure hunts are very different from scavenger hunts in that the activity requires much more than retrieving items on a list. Team building companies who arrange treasure hunts should not disturb the area on the course and the points should not interfere with other patrons in the area.

One previously common form of treasure hunt is geocaching. Geocaching is where someone hid containers for groups to locate. Teams open the containers and find cards with varying point values on them or small objects. A common problem with this type of treasure hunt program was that the geocache container was often found by someone not involved in the team building activity and caused undue alarm. It was also not very rewarding or exciting to spend the day looking for small containers.

Team building treasure hunts have come a long way and now include hunts such as: GeoQuest: The High-Tech Treasure Hunt and ClueQuest: The Indoor Treasure Hunt facilitated by Teambuildinginc.com. GeoQuest incorporates hand-held GPS units to help teams locate clues in a town, city, or zoo. Teams of approximately five people receive handheld GPS units pre-programmed with the locations of hidden treasures. The GPS units guide teams to within 20 feet of their goal. After that, they use their wits and determination to decipher written clues to find the hidden answers. GeoQuest gives participants the opportunity to work together to achieve their goals. Teams can learn about history along Boston’s Freedom Trail, discover the jungles at the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium, or explore the sites in historic Charlotte, NC.

Treasure hunts like ClueQuest: The Indoor Treasure Hunt are similar to GeoQuest, but instead of utilizing hand-held GPS units to solve clues outdoors, teams solve an emulator using Braille or sign language to solve clues indoors at locations such as the Field Museum in Chicago, the San Jose Tech Museum, the Atlanta Aquarium, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, or the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC to name a few.

GeoQuest and ClueQuest are perfect team building activities for corporate groups of all sizes. Effective teamwork, strategic thinking, planning, and communication are some of the skills needed to be successful during the treasure hunt activities. Participants learn about a city, zoo and even discover things they never knew about in their own backyards.

Team building treasure hunts continue to evolve past outdated scavenger hunts. Teambuildinginc.com has also created treasure hunt using new themes, such as CSI: On Location, Kindness Wins, and LimoQuest.

Don’t be left in the dark with scavenger hunts. Take your team on a real adventure with a new and exciting kind of treasure hunt.

When I speak at conferences about retaining winning talent and the problem of turnover, I often ask attendees to raise their hands if their fathers worked at three or fewer companies throughout their careers. As you would expect, just about everyone raises their hands. I then ask them a second more revealing question: Raise your hand if you have worked at more than three companies in your career. You guessed it…just about everyone’s hands go up again.

The moral of this story is that people don’t stay at one company for their entire career anymore. In fact, twenty years ago if your resume showed that you switched jobs every three or four years, you would have been perceived as an unstable job-hopper. Employers would have thought, “Why can’t this person hold onto a job?” Today, you would be seen as a career-oriented go-getter.

There has been a fundamental shift from lifetime employment to lifetime employability. People want to know that no matter what happens with the current employer, they will be employable elsewhere.

In a recent study by Career Systems International, career growth and development was cited by 43 percent of respondents as the reason for staying in organizations. And yet, a McKinsey study found that only 3 percent of 13,000 managers agreed that their organizations were effective at developing people.

The problem is that managers are often not great coaches, and organizations frequently don’t provide the needed training to retain employees. So on one hand, organizations complain about high turnover rates and lack of worker loyalty, yet on the other, these same organizations do not provide the very thing that employees most desire…the opportunity to learn and grow.

The best employees are life-long learners.
High-performers know that work is one big fat teachable moment. They recognize that learning comes from observation, practice, and experience. Further, they proactively seek opportunities to learn from everything they and their coworkers do.

According to research by the U.S. Department of Labor, 70 percent of workplace learning occurs informally, while the remaining 30 percent comes from formal learning programs, such as training and coaching interactions. Superstar employees don’t wait for training programs to be offered, they seek them out. But more importantly, they also make connections and draw critical insights from everyday experiences.

Individuals who seek learning in everything they do often exhibit the following behaviors:
* They are avid readers. They don’t wait for knowledge to come to them.
* They pursue it.
* They search for greatness and stay close to it. You’ll find these people hanging out with those who talk about what can be, rather than those who whine about what is not.
* These individuals find mentors who have walked the path before them and seek their advice.
* They volunteer for challenging assignments--the ones that nobody else wants for fear of failure.
* They learn from their mistakes, but perhaps more importantly, they learn from others’ mistakes so they don’t have to repeat them.

Looking forward
Individuals who leave an organization hoping that the next employer will better develop them may be sadly disappointed. Growth comes from an unwavering passion to be better and do better. The future of your organization belongs to individuals who drive their careers by seeking learning in all they do.

Ask yourself a few straightforward questions: Where do you want to be five years from now? What knowledge and skills will you need when you get there? What don’t you know yet or can’t you do yet? What are you going to do to achieve your goals? Are you taking personal responsibility to develop yourself, or are you expecting your manager or organization to help you?

Commit to making learning a priority and watch your life unfold as the grand tapestry you dreamed it would be.

Members of successful teams know one thing...if everyone holds themselves and their fellow team members accountable for getting results, the team is more likely to be successful. Success teams understand the power of collective accountability and they live it.

However, collective accountability is not only about execution, it’s also extends to the behaviors of each individual on the team. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” In a team environment, this means that each team members acts in accordance with the team’s values. Team members speak with one voice and only speak in positive terms about each other. They treat each other with respect and seek opportunities to provide feedback to each other so that learning never stops.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, once wrote, “Informed decision-making comes from a long tradition of guessing and then blaming others for inadequate results. Team that practiced collective accountability own their results and never finger point or blame others for their failures. They do not allow the group to fragment into silos and they consciously create the culture that they work in and they accept nothing less than success.

As Michael Armstrong pointed out, “The ancient Romans had a tradition: whenever one of their engineers constructed an arch, as the capstone was hoisted into place, the engineer assumed accountability for his work in the most profound way possible: he stood under the arch. Now that’s collective accountability!

If you’d like to learn more about the TeambuildingInc.com course, Step Up to Accountability, contact Dan Silvert at 888.672.1120 ext. 207.