A professional team-building facilitator 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.
Get the help you need from professional team building facilitators who can:
- Tailor-fit programs that meet your needs,
- Support you in building team trust and improving performance
- Provide you tools to solve team challenges and find new possibilities
- Design learning experiences to help you upgrade team skills
- Lead virtual workshops that deliver better results fast, for less cost
This page will explain to you how you can make the most of your next team-building experiences.
What is a team-building facilitator?
A team-building facilitator is a professional who helps a team work together, understand their common objectives, and plan to achieve these objectives. Typically, he is an experienced team leader and someone who has deep knowledge of team dynamics. He uses experiential activities, games, and tools to engage your team in team learning.
Professional team-building facilitators help teams transform from good to great. Before they begin, they clarify measurable goals, identify vital skills necessary for growth and improved performance, and explore engagement strategies to make learning stick. They work in collaboration with the members of the team and the team sponsor.
Getting professional team-building facilitators ensures a high return on experience and investment.
Team Building Workshops
Since 2007, I must have designed hundreds of team building programs that addressed unique team-building challenges. These are programs that wise managers demand, and they support both their mapped out team competencies and organizational objectives.
You will find below three of the programs that I believe we need today – and in the new normal.
Below these three programs, you will read some of the team competencies that I can design for your organization using the virtual platform.
1: Five Habits of Teams That Thrive
Our learning technology has changed, but the habits that make teams thrive remain. These team habits are more important today.
Help your teams thrive in good times and in bad times. Help leaders navigate in crisis and prepare them for the new normal. Teach members how to build teams that deliver results.
2: Creativity Tools for Adaptive Teams
The Covid-19 crisis presents opportunities we have not seen before. Many companies folded. They did not survive, yet some companies are growing wildly successful.
In a team-building workshop, you can help members find opportunities to create new solutions. Let them discover mindsets and tools that can help them find seeds of possibilities in every adversity.
3: Teamwork in the New Normal
We need to encourage malasakit at work. Work from home is not as elegant as we used to think. Employees feel frightened, left out, and discouraged. On the other hand, organizational leaders are frustrated by low productivity and show of “commitment.”
You can make employees feel that you listen and care. Create an environment that makes everyone feel valued and capable.
Strong Teams Thrive in Crisis
Today’s workplace faces many problems.
Employees are disengaged; they are too busy coping with stress and deadlines that they don’t have time to plan for team building exercises that improve performance.
Too many things keep falling through the cracks.
One department head won’t cooperate with another. Managers find themselves spending a massive amount of time mediating subordinate disputes.
Such symptoms often lead prudent managers to realize that it’s time to hold another team-building exercise.
Unfortunately, one-size-fits-all team building packages can’t help you. Contrary to popular but wrong belief, team building isn’t an event or a series of activities.
It is the responsibility of team leaders to build teams every day. This is why you must equip your supervisors on how to lead teams.
A team-building event cannot make organizational problems disappear. Most team building programs that many of us have experienced can only provide away-from-work intramural experiences.
However, well-planned and excellently-executed team building experiences can provide your team with many benefits.
High-performance teams get things done better and make things happen. Although most team-building efforts are gear towards building a stronger relationship, team building must help a team fulfill its purpose.
Yes, the first measure of a successful team is its ability to deliver results. A professional team-building facilitator can help.
Benefits of Getting Facilitators for Team Building
Result-oriented managers do not waste time, energy, and opportunities on playing same-old, same-old games that people thought to be team building.
They know that some games destroy teams even more for they promote unhealthy competition instead of positive collaboration.
Wise managers hire professional team building facilitators who can design team experiences as solutions.
They expect to see measurable results, change mindsets, and learn new behaviors vital to team success.
Consider the following benefits when you get professional team building facilitators.
1: Bring the team members together.
Businesses are moving away from competitive work environments to cooperative and collaborative workplaces.
Undertaking regular collaborative (instead of combative) team building activities can bring people to solve problems creatively.
While some people see team building as a “nice break” from work, team-building exercises have more essential purposes for the organization: it develops your employees’ team knowledge and skills.
Professional team facilitators will design experiences that bring team members together.
Build rapport and camaraderie. Allow team members to learn more about each other.
2: Boost team productivity.
Hold team-building exercises to improve the productivity of individuals and teams. Team building exercises can be used to create the opportunity to identify ways to improve the three Ps ((policies, processes, and procedures) that can affect productivity.
Using games and design thinking tools, I design team-building exercises that encourage employees to learn to work together more effectively, reduce duplication of effort so they can work more efficiently, and focus on activities that really matter.
Do you know that you can use team-building exercises so your teams can learn how to handle workplace stress and improve time management? I have team building games that highlight the value of focusing on things that matter, the delegation of tasks, increasing the speed of work, and other time management practices.
Teams with disengaged and unproductive members don’t get the job done.
Our professional team building facilitators use games so your team members understand the principles of productivity in fun and engaging ways. Facilitators may also use tools that you can let your members use after the exercises.
3: Energize employee engagement.
The team-building experiences we design for clients help improve team skills and team motivation.
The experiential activities we design increase mutual accountability.
We use positive behavioral psychology and gamification, so your team becomes more involved in their personal and professional growth.
4: Strengthen a sense of personal accountability.
Many professionals shun accountability because the word appears in the conversation, mostly when looking for someone to blame.
Properly designed team-building workshops can change mindset and behavior.
Through fun, safe, and engaging team-building games, employees experience how to move from indifference to a sense of ownership, find solutions, and make things happen. It is my aim to help companies cultivate the culture of intrapreneurship.
Accountability can be learned through games. It is a skill that can be acquired in a team through able facilitation and mentorship.
Through group dynamics, The team building facilitators can help discover how people can change their questions to find the best answers, and then 10X their results.
5: Encourage creativity and innovation.
I personally picked facilitators who have a passion for encouraging people to re-discover their inner creative person.
During team activities, you will see your team members smiling and growing in confidence.
Your organization needs creative and innovative members of the team. You need teams with diverse perspectives and expertise to “cross-pollinate” the organization with ideas.
Our team building facilitators in the Philippines use exercises that encourage team members to use their imagination to come up with creative solutions — and cultivate that creativity in the workplace.
I encourage you to conduct your next team building in the Philippines. This is a beautiful country.
6: Build open and honest communication.
The most obvious result of our team-building exercises is improved communication.
Enjoyable, fun activities enable employees to know each other, create a better understanding of each other’s values, and break down walls of mistrust.
Team-building exercises let them appreciate their similarities and respect their differences.
To improve team performance, team members must learn how to celebrate diversity.
Through games, I have conducted team building programs that show team members how to navigate across cultures and promote honest-to-goodness communication.
7: Enable champion sales teams.
Every year, sales organizations aim to motivate people through team building. Smart managers know that team building can go beyond motivation.
Team building experiences can dramatically help your team members learn how to sell, negotiate, and keep clients. You only need to design the right team experiences.
Your team can gain new knowledge on how to sell through sales training. But team-building experiences designed by our facilitators develop champion selling skills.
Enjoy the benefits of hiring professional team-building facilitators to accelerate performance improvement. Contact us.
8: Build customer-driven teams.
Yes. Customer experience is a team effort.
Most customer service training fails because it relies on individual efforts to serve the customers’ needs.
Teams who care enough about customers plan and execute experiences that delight customers. You can increase customer loyalty through fun and creative team-building exercises.
Of course, I will suggest that aside from team-building exercises, you explore customer experience management and teach your people how to create magical moments through customer journey mapping.
Our team building facilitators use gamification and design thinking to help your team develop common vocabulary in creating customer experiences
Common Questions
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.
