Team building
Team building describes how a group of people socially develops into a team. You can actively influence this process, trying to support the team to cooperate better. The group of independent people should thus be transferred into a well-cooperating team. One simple and fun method of doing so are team building games.
What is team building?
Everywhere in society, independent personalities are put together in groups, that have to work together to solve a problem, work on different tasks or just have a good time together. Transforming such a group into a well-cooperating team takes some time and often a lot of effort. In 1965, Bruce Tuckman presented his four (later: five) phases of group development:
- forming
- storming
- norming
- performing
- (adjourning)
If you give the team enough time, it will work through all those phases and eventually become a "performing" team. However, you can actively influence and thus speed up this process. Some games here in the games-wiki can help you speed up the process, while being more fun for the team than learning it "the hard way" during some work task.
Adequate games for all phases
To create groups in the first place, you can use group allocation games.
- forming
During the first phase, the members of the group have to learn to know each other. Ice breaker games are a great method of allowing them to get in touch with each other. When they don't know each other's names or they need to train them, additionally play a few name learning games.
Usually, the participants are a bit shy during this first phase, and don't allow the others to see too much of their own personality. Additionally, they don't really trust each other. You can use some simpler trust building games to allow first steps in that direction. Ensure not to overburden your players and wait with more demanding tasks until a later phase!
- storming
For a group in this phase, group dynamics games and tasks can help to make the transition to the next phase smoother. The tasks should be adequate for the group, neither overburden nor bore the members. Of vital importance is the feedback from the trainer, that helps the team to realize how they behaved individually and as a team. Together, they should reflect their performance and try to find ways to optimize it.
- norming
During this third phase, the groups should transform into a well-cooperating team. Again, you can use group dynamics games to support this, but also more demanding trust building games can be helpful to learn to know each other even better. They can strengthen the trust and thus cooperation in the team.
- perfoming
The team should now be in shape and perform well. You can now use relaxing games of different types (communication games, acting games, coordination games, ...) to bring some fun into the team. Of course, you can still use the previously mentioned games to improve and reflect the team's performance, like demanding group dynamics games.
