Teach Empathy to Build Teamwork

Trust falls are crap. Improv theater is for engineering education.

Many of us have had the experience of participating in team- or trust-building exercises. Maybe we were at a corporate retreat, in some kind of college orientation, or at a youth summer camp. If your experiences are like mine, then you and your colleagues have run the obstacle courses, built the spaghetti towers, and played some version of “two truths and a lie” (the worst), or done the infamous trust fall.

All of which has never, in my experience, amounted to anything.

Although these games might give us a temporary good feeling about our coworkers, they don’t result in any new knowledge of one another that translates into our personal or professional lives. There are conditions in which playing together can create long-lasting personal bonds, but the types of children’s games that many corporate ice breakers employ aren’t it.