Team Building for Resilience: Preparing Your Team for Real World Challenges

Building a high-performance team for high-profile projects?

 Equip your them with tools to confidently face high pressure obstacles.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

On average, companies spend around $50 to 100$ per person, per Team Building event to improve overall performance.

These activities help make sure the team doesn't crumble under pressure. When navigating new challenges, they won’t need to struggle extensively.

How does Team Building for resilience help prepare your members for real world challenges, even to problems that you might not be aware of yet?

Team Building: A Practice Arena for Problem-Solving

The flexibility of Team Building activities lets you simulate situations to practice resilience. Carefully chosen, these activities help improve your team’s problem-solving and decision-making skills.

Additionally, they get to do these things together. It’s an added bonus to Team Building: get to know each other's capabilities well enough that you lean on each other's strengths.

A well-planned Team Building creates a controlled, enjoyable environment that teaches how to handle stressful scenarios, individually and together.

It's also a neutral zone where office politics are more balanced, making the experience more focused on the challenge than the hierarchy.

The experience might also surprise you. Employees who tend to be quiet can suddenly take on leader roles. Someone who likes to work alone can discover his potential in a collaborative effort with others. Doing something entirely new together can help the team bond, improve communication styles and foster understanding.

The benefits of Team Building can be as many as the opportunities and conflicts you can simulate in a single activity.

Create Simulations for Your Objectives

The design of any Team Building activity depends on the objectives, so the more specific you could get, the better.

Here are some guiding questions to help you prioritize what you want to achieve:

1. If there is one thing the team could do to improve day-to-day productivity, what would that be?

2. How common are the opportunities for your members to work together? Is the accomplishment of the goal dependent on the strength of collaboration? Are they working independently, which lowers their awareness of each other's personality and work styles?

3. How resistant are they in participating in new and high-pressure projects?

4. Is handling problems at work a shared responsibility or limited to a few?

Common Team Objectives and How Team Building Can Help

Improve Collaboration

Introducing the importance of collaboration could be tricky to do in an office setup, especially if they have limited opportunities to work together and are therefore not aware of what they could achieve together.

This would require designing an activity that will highlight familiarity and confident reliance on each other's contribution, as well as a tangible and immediate reflection on the outcome of collaborative effort.

Example: Bike2Give

Here, individual efforts culminate with a team creation that is doubly fulfilling with its social responsibility goals. The competition aspect is also added fuel to work together.

Develop Company Values

Sharing company values makes it a culture, which then becomes an integral part of the company's brand. This could help attract like-minded potential talents and prospects.

To instill shared values, it's important to target empathy and a common cause. You have to give them something to care about, starting with awareness.

Example: The Ultimate Expedition

This is a team mission and sustainability cause wrapped within a series of fun activities that bring awareness to ecological problems. After such activity, the team could incorporate, collectively, these learned practices at work and even in their lives.

Boost Creativity and Innovation

Even the most creative team gets stuck in coming up with fresh ideas sometimes. You can help by having them step outside the box, figuratively and literally. Create an opportunity for them to be creative with something else entirely and hold it outside the confines of the office.

Many creatives know that you need to step away from complex problems to give your brain a chance to subconsciously work on untangling what's tripping you up. And a fun, unrelated activity where you can toss ideas around could give the juice you need to kick-start the creativity processes again.

For example: Restaurant Story

This activity encompasses the whole production process, from brainstorming, branding, production, and getting feedback from results.

Resilience

Safely simulating difficult situations to overcome together can help test their capabilities and help them see just how much more they can do beyond what they think their limit is.

With the support of others, one can find fulfillment (and even joy) in working under pressure. If you craft an activity that would challenge their endurance, they could learn to lift each other up and be inspired by one another.

Teach them that hard times don't have to be an entirely negative experience.

For example: Survival of the Best

This is a hiking mission with thrilling challenges, aimed at highlighting your team’s capability to push through adversity.

Decision-Making as a Team

Give them an obstacle that is new to most or all of them. This would require them to analyze the situation together and swiftly make decisions to guide their collective actions.

This would also drive home the importance of clear communication between your members in creating a sound strategy and in executing this strategy. One should follow just as equally well as they give instructions.

For example: Sailing Regatta

Riding a single vessel to a pre-set route, the team has to take turns taking on leadership roles and speaking up. It is a team initiative to get to a destination despite obstacles.

Reward Your Team

After a particularly difficult period, like a high-tension conflict or a demanding project, it helps the members feel appreciated if it is made known that their hard work is seen and recognized.

Opposite the high-energy team-building activities are the more relaxed options where your team is only expected to be rejuvenated and decompressed.

For example: Wellness Retreats

Wellness retreats are refreshing breaks to gain mental clarity and combat fatigue. This helps everyone regain balance in mind, body, and spirit.

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Operating under the creativity and innovation of The Events Team, Mission Possible aims to craft Team Building events that are immersive, productive, and specific to your company goals.

We’re here to help you plan and implement simulations for your hard-working team.

Contact a Mission Possible Agent.