Team-building Games

— Ropes Course, Burning Coals & Paintball Gear not included

There’s nothing wrong with cliche activities at your company off-site, oftentimes the most cliche activities became so for good reason.

That said, let’s make sure you have more options so you’ll have a more custom design at each company event. Sometimes anything more than having that organic soft-serve cart come in for the day would seem like overkill after meeting a simple deadline, while other times the same ice cream would utterly fail to honor the level of sacrifice the latest sprint required of your team.

“It’s the thought that counts” is a good start, sometimes any gesture at all that acknowledges a great team doing great work is too rare a thing, but let’s look at a more intentional option for fostering camaraderie and preventing burnout — Team-building Games.

First a quick note on how to relate to Team-building: I got a lot of flack many years ago for naming my events “Game Nights”, and fair enough occasionally someone did show up excited for a relaxing evening of Catan (and was in for a much more intense experience)! Yet a decade later Game Nights were a monthly occurrence in over a dozen countries across six continents.

I like to think part of the appeal was that “games” are played less from any sense that you “should” play them, and more for the simple joy of the play. However essential it is to cultivate real and raw communication, and however confronting deeper connection can be at times, a lot of the pitfalls like being too cheesy or too heavy-handed are avoided when approaching this from the frame “Nothing is wrong with our communication, and yet how might our interactions with each other become even more effective and rewarding?”

As for facilitating these activities, masterful facilitation deserves an entire handbook of it’s own, so I’ve simply organized an example of three games for you in categories from “mild” to “medium” to “spicy”. I realized early on in my career that activities like these often had a few people dubious of how confronting an exercise might be, while at the same event a few more “wild west” types were quickly frustrated no one was in tears yet! I highly recommend helping set expectations for the various personality types on your team by…

1. Only facilitating games you’ve personally benefited from in some way OR taking the pressure off by requesting everyone’s help trying out a new game.
2. Clarifying the purpose of team-building games is similar to a CEO working in the business versus on the business…games can be a fun way to invest in teamwork with your colleagues by continually improving not only what you build but also how you build it.
3. Explicitly introducing each game to your team with a label of “mild/medium/spicy”. Telling your participants something like “this warm-up activity should be more on the mild side” all the way to “for some of you this next one’s more on the spicy side so feel free to speak up if you want to adjust how you play this game”, is a way you can play the role of maestro such that everyone can participate at their own speed.

Mild — The Curiosity Game

Intention: Coming to understand someone’s personal experience so thoroughly that not only you learn things about them, they often learn something about themselves in the process!

Instructions:

• Pair everyone up, designating Participant A and B.
• Give Participant A five minutes to do one thing and one thing only: Ask Questions. Clarify that in this game there is no such thing as an inappropriate question as long as you are sincerely curious about their answer AND are totally respectful anytime someone opts not to answer. I often suggest you are playing this game well when you manage to ask an edgy enough question Participant B refuses to answer at least once! Remind Participant B that the more concise their answers, the more questions they’ll have time to receive.
• Pause at five minutes and direct Participant B to offer one minute of feedback to Participant A, specifying one way they’ve enjoyed their curiosity so far as well as one way their questions might improve.
• Resume the game with another five minutes of questions, not assuming they will continue the initial lines of inquiry.
• Direct Participant A to now offer one minute reflections on what they’ve discovered about Participant B, as a connoisseur might reflect on a sculpture or painting!
• “My first impression of you was…”
• “The moment I felt most impacted by you was…”
• “Something I think I just got about you is…”
• Have everyone complete with a gesture of acknowledgement for their partner, and then shuffle all of the pairs before switching roles by having all A Participants raise their hands so that all B Participants can choose their new partner. If this exercise is happening virtually, save yourself quite a bit of effort as the facilitator by allowing the pairs to stay together and just switch roles OR you will have to re-pair everyone by hand to avoid some people asking questions twice and some not getting the chance to practice.

Medium — User Manual

Intention: Teach best practices for working together, helping people understand how to best leverage your strengths and account for your blind-spots!

Instructions:

• Group participants in triads.
• Give each person ten minutes to theatrically describe what it might be like to work with them, describing their “features” as if they were a home appliance! They should attempt to clarify both the best aspects of their model as well as “defects” to watch out for, and encourage their partners to ask clarifying questions along the way, as well as to take notes so each person walks away with a draft they may further flesh out with their managers.
• Complete the game after thirty minutes by bringing the entire group back together and either taking a few shares from people who gained some new insights, or when time allows have each triad present each person’s User Manual with the entire team.

Spicy — Fly on the Wall

Intention: Foster radical levels of trust and camaraderie across a leadership team. Highlight opportunities for more transparency in the group as well as personal growth for each individual.

Instructions:

• Assign one team member to be “The Fly” and sit in a chair near the circle of their colleagues, instructing The Fly to listen in as everyone talks about them as if they weren’t in the room.
• Ask The Fly if they prefer people to restrict their comments to things they sincerely think or feel, or if they invite team members to take more creative license around gossip-like comments they have a hunch may trigger some insecurity worth exploring afterwards!
• Give the group up to ten minutes to talk about The Fly, understanding that for newer teams they will often find a natural stopping point much sooner as there is less history and content. Pause the process at any point their comments misalign with requests from the Fly, including if the comments seem more “polite” or reserved than has been requested!
• Complete the gossip session, and invite The Fly back into the circle to share what the experience was like for them, flagging any poignant moments they may want to have a sincere, non-theatric conversation about.
• Assign the next “Fly” and continue the process, modifying as you go as your team shares any ways they found the game most rewarding for them.

These games are three of countless ones I’ve designed and adapted over the years, I hope they inspire ideas for more intentional team-building in your organizations. If you have any hesitation about facilitating exercises, either because they might be too touchy-feely to be relevant for high performing teams or too emotionally confronting for those who wisely prefer less personal connections at work, I highly recommend not leading anything until you’re 100% clear on it. Some of the best team-building conversations I’ve witnessed were sparked by a debate about why a game might not have been best suited for their company! Remember the whole point of framing them as games to encourage not being attached to them playing out any particular way, and enjoying the process however it plays out. Most entrepreneurs I’ve had the privilege of working with quickly learn how critical this attitude can be, not just in an exercise but for every single day they bring their best to their startup.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in seed-stage companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and computing

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