Professional team-building facilitators can help you tailor-fit your live and virtual team-building experiences to your needs. Make things happen even in tough times. Build teams that thrive.
FAQS
A team-building facilitator is a trainer, coach, or professional who helps teams find solutions to their team challenges through learning sessions, games, activities, and other shared experiences. The facilitator’s purpose is to bring out the wisdom of the members so they can solve their problems.
The first task of new team leaders is to know the members of the team. Listen to them. Find out their stories, dreams, values, aspirations, and the result they want as part of the team. Every team you lead is a new team. Whatever works with previous teams you led may not work with the new ones. So, spend a pretty good time knowing and understanding the people you will work with.
To build a strong, cohesive team, find out what can bring the team together. Look into values, beliefs, dreams, complementary skill sets, and working styles. Then, focus on building trust, accountability, commitment, harmony, and success. Building a cohesive team is simple but not easy. It is a process that does not always follow a timeline. The ingredients I have given are easy and proven ways. You can try them.
Teamwork is a spirit of oneness, and it happens when people choose to work together to achieve a goal that no single individual can achieve. You don’t have to be a member of a team to exercise teamwork. For example, during rescue operations, strangers decide to help each other for a common purpose: to save other strangers. There is no leader, there are no roles, but everyone agrees to work together. In team building, we want to cultivate teamwork for it to happen more often.
Team building skills allow a team to work well together to achieve more remarkable performance. These skills include goal-orientation, decision-making, open and honest communication, collaboration, cooperation, team accountability, and execution. Some organizations have creativity, experimentation, and speed to the mix.
The role of team-building facilitators is like that of midwives. They support you (the team) and your baby (the goals) in the process of becoming strong and cohesive. A team-building facilitator isn’t a lecturer, though he may contribute inputs. The role of a team-building facilitator is to make it easy for your team to succeed. You may need a process facilitator during your team learning sessions or team-building activities. In the Philippines, many of those who called themselves facilitators are game masters — it helps if you know the difference.
The client defines the task of a facilitator in leading a team-building program. The client can be the sponsor or the team leader. Facilitators will design the learning experiences and define the process of team building, but always in consultation with the team leader and with the approval of the sponsor. You don’t get this when you buy team-building packages from team-building organizers because they sell the games, not the goals. So, be discerning.
The team-building facilitator must help the team reexamine their mindsets and behaviors to achieve their desired results. Team learning sessions, games, and activities must revolve around these purposes.
During team learning games and activities, the facilitator must remind the team of the overall goals and clarify how the team-building exercise can help achieve these goals.
Focus on goals and build skills and mindsets that will help the team achieve — these are the things that a team building facilitator must be able to do.
Games in team-building provide the opportunities to learn together from a shared experience. Games are like metaphors for real-world challenges where people can learn to work together in a safe, friendly environment without losing billions of pesos. It is important to choose your team-building games very carefully, as, like metaphors, games may send mixed messages. Ensure that you know how to debrief a team-building game.
Activities in team building are shared experiences. Members will learn from the experiences. Designing activities to help members learn is a job you leave to professionals or those who understand learning experience design — or you will get the opposite of what you expect.
We use virtual team-building activities and games when designing team learning experiences. When people are having fun, you can move them to action. The team-building activities, when designed well, can help you build relationships, increase team skills, and make the team thrive.
