Team Building - Collaborative vs. Competitive

Think back to all the team building sessions that have participated over the years. There is a very good chance that each of them the facilitators organized the group into teams. Any who were not were probably small groups. Does this sound familiar? Why do they do?

Well, one answer is to encourage maximum involvement by participants. Small team to ensure that everyone joins in. quieter people will be less likely to overshadow the smaller the team but are not the only - reason - or even the main.

Most team building events are run as competitions. Teams are usually given the same goals and are awarded points that move toward them. Points mean prizes and the winning team members get to take them away. Why?

There are some answers to that:

* Competitive events are relatively simple to perform.

* Put a group of people in a team and it is easier to justify the training budget.

* Competition generates a buzz.

* Many conferences are for sales people, who are naturally competitive.

If all these factors are relevant to your conference, then a competitive event is probably a good decision for you. However, two factors that might make a decision less good. Organizations are increasingly looking to organize events for non-sales functions and many of these competitors see it as a bad thing. Secondly, senior managers often prefer to emphasize the "great team" approach important for a large department or organization as a whole. If one or both of these are relevant to your group, then a competitive event is not the best choice.

The opposite of a competitive event is a collaborative. The entire group is assigned a common goal to work together rather than multiple, identical to those working in isolation. They can still be organized in teams or not, but the key feature is that everyone is working together with everyone else to get something like a whole group.

Options are designed to be collaborative, not only there - are among the most entertaining conference or away day events for the participants themselves. They can offer a superb mix of camaraderie, corporate message, learning and fun.

It is the combination of a great achievement for a team building event? In fact, it is not a result that you want from your teams to work - day after day? Sure, you want the individual groups aim to be the best - but not at the expense of the company's goal or goals. You want the natural motivation that feels the best teams to be productive for the organization - not bad for other teams and, therefore, detrimental to the organization.

What does a collaborative team building aspect? I wrote a series of other articles that describe the features you would expect to find in good options generally. Rather than duplicate here, I will focus on those elements that can concentrate on collaboration in particular. They are:

* There is one common goal that all individuals and / or groups have to work.

* There is a real possibility - even likelihood - of the group to join.

* Not all individuals and teams are doing the same thing - multiple, different functions is a feature of the workplace and should be a feature of a task team if learning must be relevant.

* At work, participants need to exercise some form of overall coordination to keep the attention on the common.

So at your next team building event, do not send your people away bragging about how they managed to overcome their colleagues - send them away thinking, at least in part how well they worked with them. Then, perhaps, back to work something might just rub off.

Sandstone Limited ......