Teambuilding Behind the Wheels

Team Building and Innovation

The success of any innovative endeavour depends on the level of development and growth in the team. Besides having the right talent in the team, it needs the right combination of skills resided in the team to keep it intact and resilience for the challenges of bringing ideas, in the form of breakthroughs and innovations, to market. Teams, which members are in loggerheads with each other, are more likely to focus their efforts and energies to avoid letting their positional power and influence reconfigured during the in-fighting, and least bother with getting the breakthroughs for the organisation. The very purpose of the team is largely forgotten as team members either fight or flight to survive.

To keep these negative aspects of group dynamics from affecting the performance of the team and the eventual outcomes their efforts have produced, team building and imbuing the team with the awareness and competencies for working in team becomes even more crucial.

There is no one official description of ‘Team Building’ but team building professionals have defined the term as:

‘a purpose-driven process, developed along to a systematic plan, to create, maintain and enrich the development of a group of people into a cohesive unit that delivers.’

There is much confusion over the distinction between team building and team bonding. Team bonding occurs when people forms close and personal relationships through frequent interactions in the team. Bonding is a pre-requisite for team building. The team will only mature and grow when members trust each other. However, team bonding is less formal and structured, since the key objective of bonding activities, like having meals together, engaging in a game after work, and other social events, is to mingle and socialise at a personal level, there are little behavioural changes arising from these interactions.

On the other hand, team building takes a progressive approach in developing the competencies of individuals and dynamics of a group of people in order to increase their propensity to perform more efficiently and deliver outcomes more effectively as a team. Team building activities help people understand that they are better synergistically as a collective than as individuals. It helps people see the benefits of collaboration to leverage on the talent, expertise and resource networks of another. It is essentially bringing people to a place where authentic appreciation of each other’s assumptions, beliefs, and values could take place so that new win-win social arrangements could be created for all parties involved. Therefore, team building is never a one-off event. It should occur as a series of activities to continuously shape and unify the team through competency building and practicing these in the form of habits.

Unlike most team building workshops, I advocate a competency component that is designed around The Team Building SpiralTM to enable learning among members on how to develop and growth their own team.

The spiral provides a structured process that helps participants acquire their aspirations, awareness, competencies, and drive necessary in the development and growth of their own team as members. In this 1-day workshop, participants are able to:

• Get inspired by others to aspire for greater things for their own team
• Uncover the current health status of their team
• Learn where they could draw their energies from to grow their team
• Acquire the 7 competencies for growing highly successful teams
• Transfer these competencies as practices into their workplace

Four learning technologies will be employed to enable participants’ learning at the workshop. These are:

Uncovering Your Personal Propensity to Develop and Grow an Effective Team

Assigning the wrong person to a job has costly consequences. A personality profile provides information on an individual’s preferred behavioural tendencies and patterns. It shows the level of personal propensity of each individual member in developing and growing their team effectively. The information from the profile helps team members improve the way they contribute to the team’s capability and capacity for performance and outcomes.

There are 3 different profiles to choose from for this workshop and here is some advice on which profile is most suitable for your team:

Participants will also uncover the state of the team’s current constitution. By knowing the status of the team’s growth and development, the members in the team are able to explain the difficulties faced while working with the team. You can try one of this profile by visiting this URL or if you have a Facebook account you could click here as well.

Using Exercises and Activities to Create Experiential Based Learning

Research reveals that participants recall better when they enjoyed themselves during the workshop. The National Training Laboratory (USA) concludes that learning by doing (experiential learning) is more effective than the traditional classroom learning.


Ellen J. Langer, in her book 'The Power of Mindful Learning', suggests that people seek novelty in experiential learning and learn by figuring out how to win. This need to win and overcome challenges is a strong motivational factor for learning. Also, when engaged in activities, people are in a more relaxed mode and less conscious of their past experiences that may create resistance to their own learning.

As this is a competency based programme, a selection of exercises and activities will be introduced to help participants acquire the competencies of being members in effective teams. A total of 7 competencies will be introduced and activated at the workshop so that participants are able to practice them as habits back in the office.

Conducive Endurance 35 Learning Environment

Co-authors for the ‘World Class Training’, Kaye Thorne and David Mackey, state that the ‘most memorable learning experiences through experiential learning usually take place in a special environment’. The correct choice of location and layout are vital to encourage experiential learning.

Part of this workshop will take place on board the Endurance 35, a sailing boat located at Changi, Singapore.

This will provide an ideal out-of-the-norm setting, away from the rigidities of work stations, power politics of the boardrooms, and inflexible classrooms layouts, for learning. This unique environment setting would prove to be a refreshing and certainly more interesting change for people wanting to find ways to strengthen their teams by learning the 7 competencies. During teambuilding, this informal atmosphere also sets the stage for people to subconsciously reveal traits otherwise concealed during formal settings.

Using Focused Discussion for Debriefs

Focused Discussion, which is a trademarked interaction technology from the Institute of Cultural Affairs, Canada, will form the basis for conducting debriefs at the end of each exercise. The technology provides a structure that:

• Allows the entire group to participate
• Creates meaningful conversations, dialogues, and discourses
• Broadens perspectives
• Produces clear ideas and conclusions

This discussion method uses a series of questions that:
Follows a specific sequence

• Are adaptable to any situations and groups
• Are ordered carefully so that they progress in accordance to the awareness level of the participants. It takes the participants through four stages of awareness – being objective, reflective, interpretive and decisive
• Allow people to become conscious of how their thinking can becomes actions
• Produces group reflections and decision based on all the available information
• Directs the thinking of the group toward an actionable decision

Copyright 2008 & 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.