Building Your Team

Fun Corporate Team Building Events

Best Cities for Annual Retreats and Team Building

November 10th, 2011

Our instructors travel all over the world to conduct team building events for our client companies, and we each have our favorite locations to travel to and lead team building event. This list is not necessarily the “Best Cities” but they are the cities that we most like to travel to and teach in. We hope you agree.

Las Vegas, Nevada: Las Vegas is still an extremely fun and cost effective location to hold an annual convention or team building event. Hotel expenses are literally a half to a third the expense that you’d invest in other cities, and the huge casinos are like cities in and of themselves. Your team will likely never have to leave the casino and still feel like they have seen “it all.” Also, because the hotels and event planners are well seasoned, planning and delivering a world-class event is very easy and turn-key. More information about team building in Las Vegas.
Orlando and Miami, Florida: Orlando is probably one of the most popular convention cities in the world because of the great weather and famous attractions. Just like in Las Vegas, a great bonus is that the event planners and hotel staffs are well-seasoned and very easy to work with. Be sure to insert free-time into your agenda so that your participants can enjoy the resort-like atmosphere that most convention hotels in Orlando have. Miami is also very popular for similar reasons, but Miami is a little more tropical and “adult oriented.” Either location will give you a fantastic convention or team building event, but Orlando is a little more family-friendly. More information about Orlando Team Building and Miami Team Building.
Chicago, Illinois: The Navy Pier, The Magnificent Mile, and a nice compact city center make Chicago a fantastic place to hold your annual convention. In many locations, participants can walk to additional attractions and location, but a short cab-ride is also easy to find. Just like with the Florida location and Vegas, Chicago has a vast pool of great event planners, but because hotel space is a lot more limited in Chicago, your event will take a little more planning. A Cubs game is a nice bonus for visitors as well. The food in Chicago is impeccable as well. Whether you favor a Chicago Dog or Deep Dish Chicago-style pizza or a great steak, Chicago is a great place to gain a few pounds. More Chicago Team Building information.
San Francisco, California: San Francisco is a great place to hold a convention or annual meeting, but logistically, San Francisco can cause a few transportation challenges. Because of city politics, many of the big convention hotels are located outside of San Francisco proper (and also because of the high concentration of companies south of San Francisco in Silicon Valley. So getting your group from their hotel to some of the attractions can increase your total cost a little, but the hotels are still a great value compared to other major metropolitan areas. Attractions like the Wharf, Alcatraz, and Candlestick Park offer great outings for your group. San Francisco Team Building information.
Washington, DC: Although it takes a little more planning because of the congestion, Washington, DC is one of the absolute best places to conduct a convention — especially if your group favors a historical perspective. The city has a number of nice convention hotels and attractions galore. The city is easy to get around in via walking or cab rides as well. The major drawback to Washington, DC is the customer service. Unlike cities like Vegas and Orlando where, no matter who at a hotel you communicate with, you will always get a warm and friendly response and immediate service, in Washington, DC, So, you might have to make simple request more than once to get satisfaction, and the service may not be as fast as you might require. Information about Washington DC Team Building.
New York, NY: New York city is a fabulous place to hold a convention, because it is the center of economic activity and the home of Broadway and Times Square. The sites and sounds of New York can make any convention a memorable event. The city has three major airports and taxi-rides into the city are fairly inexpensive as well. The one major problem with New York as a convention destination, though, is the hotel rules. Most of the staff at the hotels have strict union rules that can cause a few challenges for the uninitiated. For example, the union rules demand that setting up a station at an event generate a minimum of two hours of labor for the waiters/waitresses, so you will often find a waiter standing next to your food or beverage station while you team is on break — not refreshing, but just standing — and then often pack up station early. As long as you know their rules, you will have fewer challenges, but a good, local event planner in New York is really worth it to you. New York Team Building information.

These are just a few of our favorite cites for team building, so this is, by no means, a comprehensive list. For instance, our home base in Dallas, Texas is a great place because of it’s central location and attractions. Atlanta, Georgia is also a great team building city because of it’s airport and great downtown area. Seattle, Washington is probably one of the most overlooked location to do team building, but has a lot of advantages. And, of course, Los Angeles and San Diego are fantastic team building locations.

Whatever location that you choose, make sure and contact one of our team building staff for details about delivering one of out world-famous team building events.

Review of a Few Team Building Tips

November 3rd, 2011

Below are a few team building articles and team building tips that we published on the blog in past months. (Sometimes, real good ideas get buried, so here is a review of a few.)

Team Building Game: The Helium Stick

One of my favorite team building games or team icebreaker activities is sometimes called The Helium Stick or even Lighter than Air. The rules are pretty simple. Organize your group into small groups of eight to ten people (you’ll need at least six people per team to make it work, but more than eight or [...]

Do You Really Know How To Motivate Your Team?

Leadership, And Management Skills Are Not Coded Into Our DNA. Do You Really Know How To Motivate Your Team? Leadership and management skills are not coded into our DNA. But you hear people say, “He or she is a born leader.” Well….not really. They may know less about their own team and what motivates it [...]

Free Team Building Activity-Playing Card Shuffle

Here is a free team building activity that can insert a ton of energy into your meeting right as you get started. If you have a big group that you need to organize into smaller teams (or tables), The Playing Card Shuffle is a great way to do it. To setup the room in advance, [...]

More team building tips at http://www.leadersinstituteteambuilding.com/free-tips-videos/free-team-building-tips

How to Pick the Best Team Building Event for Your Company

October 19th, 2011

One of the most common challenges that event planners or convention organizers encounter is picking the perfect team building event for each group that they represent. We always want to organize something new and fresh, and we often want to have a memorable experience that participants talk about for weeks or months. So how to you determine what the absolute best team building event is for your group? Answer these simple questions, and the options will be narrowed down to just the events that will work for your team.

How Big is Your Group?

The main aspect of your group that will exclude many team building options is the size of the group. If your group is relatively small, many events just won’t work as well, and if your group is too big, other team events will need to be excluded. The general rule of thumb is that the smaller your group is, the better “behavior change” type team building events work, and the larger the event, the more you will want to look at Charity Team Building Events.

Small Groups: For smaller groups, team building skills like communication skills, people skills, conflict resolution, and coaching are a fantastic way to create a team culture for your group. If you have 15, 20, or 30 team members, you can create a real esprit de corps among team members, and team building events like this are really cost effective as well. A half-day event can typically be scheduled for as little as $2,500. So teams can generate great results for a smaller fee.

Middle Sized Groups: If your group size is between 30 and 50 people, experiential non-charity team building is a better fit. Events like outdoor team scavenger hunts or murder mystery events work extremely well for this sized group. If you are organizing a team scavenger hunt, you can organize the team into eight to 12 small groups on the treasure hunt, and they will have a blast. The murder mystery event can be delivered in a similar way. With less than 10 groups, every team is active and having fun. However, if you only have 10 people and you organize either one of these events, you’ll have a competition between, at most, two groups, so a lot of the fun is drained out of the events. If you have 20 or 30 teams all participating in and event like this, it will be confusing and the small groups will be stepping on each others toes — not what you want in team building.

Larger Groups: Once your group gets bigger than 50 people (and even as big as 500 or 5000 people) Charity Team Building Events are a much better choice. The reason why is that a Charity Team Event like a Build-A-Bike Event or Ace Race is extremely high energy team event where big groups of people can interact simultaneously, and the bigger the event, the bigger the impact. If you have a group of 20 people building bikes for kids, four or six bikes is not all that exciting, but if you have 500 people building bikes, and you donate 100 bikes to the Boys and Girls Club, it is a big deal. The bigger the group, the more necessary it is to conduct charity team building.

What is Your Venue

Choose an event that is appropriate to the venue. Often, if the event is at a tropical resort, event organizers will often hear, “Let’s do something outside,” and since the team building event is one of the few things that can be conducted outside, they decide to conduct the event outside even though it may not be practical. For instance, if you organize a scavenger hunt or treasure hunt at a fabulous resort, it won’t be nearly as fun as one in a downtown area. They may get to see the pool, and the cabanas, and the spa, but they will just see them in passing as the move around the resort. In a downtown area, though, they can uncover the history of the city, identify often-overlooked art masterpieces, and more. Often, when you hear the “Can we do something outside,” comments, that is code for, “We are at a fabulous resort, but we don’t get any time to enjoy the location because we are in stinking meetings all day.” So just give the participants a little more free time, and you’ll get better results. One of our favorite events for resort locations is the Ace Race Golf Team Building Event where we have participants build an entire mini-golf course out of non-perishable food items that later get donated to the local food bank.

If you use these guidelines, you’ll pick an awesome team building event for your group!

Team Building Tip-The Entertainment Value of Team Building Events

October 2nd, 2011

Team Building Tip-The Entertainment Value of Team Building Events

I’m ashamed to say that in the early part of my speaking career, I totally underestimated the value of entertainment in team building. Don’t get me wrong. I knew from day one that the best way to teach was to do so while people are having fun. Since I came from a teaching background, I learned very early on that people learn faster when they are laughing, so there has always been a focus on making the learning process entertaining. However, in the last ten years or so, a whole new team building industry has come onto the scene, and as a result, the entertainment aspect of training — specifically team building activities and events — has taken on a much bigger prominence.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my friends invited my family to go to Six Flags for a corporate event that his company throws every year. The company has about 3000 employees, so they rented out the entire theme park for their employees for the whole day, and they have been doing it for years. It was entirely designed as an entertaining reward for their employees, and it was quite fun. Conventions, incentive retreats, special events, and the like have long been a part of the rewards for working with big companies, but in recent years, the “shared experience” has expanded into charity team building events where the entire group actually works together for a common goal. These types of team building experiences have had a fantastically positive effect on corporate cultures and charitable organizations all over the world.

Corporate Team Building Events are More Complicated than Standard Corporate Entertainment Event

Because corporate executives and event planners have been organizing these entertainment packages for decades, they sometimes think that a big team building event should be organized the same way. This common mistake can cause big challenges, though, and the event will often flop.

For example, about once every couple of months, our instructors will receive a request to do a bike building event, but they will specifically ask that the event be just the building process without really having any team building activities. Last week, we got a call from an event planner who wanted 400 people to build 200 bikes as a “day to give back to the community.” After conducting over 3000 Build-A-Bike® team building programs, we’ve learned a lot about the bike building process. One of these truths is that the actual building of the bike is not that fun or exciting in and of itself.

When was the last time you were sitting up on Christmas Eve looking at a box of parts and thinking to yourself, “Man, I can’t wait to put that thing together”? The putting together of parts is not really fun — it’s work. Another problem is that most of the bikes shipped from Huffy or other bike companies come fairly assembled. It might take someone who is a bike novice about 15 to 20 minutes to put assemble one, and maybe 5 minutes for someone who has mechanical experience. So it would take 400 people a maximum of 20 minutes to put all 200 bikes together, and at the conclusion, there wouldn’t really be any type of shared experience created.

Most participants would walk away thinking, “Okay, I did my duty,” but they wouldn’t take a lot of pride in their work. It’s also not something that they would remember as being fun or entertaining.

A Great Team Building Event is Fun and Challenging!

This is where great team building events come in. Just like on a sports team, the fun and teamwork comes from overcoming adversity together. The pride and sense of accomplishment come from achieving something that was challenging. And delivering a challenging activity in a fun and memorable way is an art. The very best team building event facilitators are those who sweep the audience into a fun activity making it appear as though a competition is occurring within the group. Those who can get positive peer pressure working in a way to build up energy along the way and add a little bit of comedy can ensure that the events are effective every time. One of the reasons why charity team building events like Build-A-Bike and The Ace Race are so popular is that while these events are going on, team members are laughing and having fun, and because of the shared challenges that they overcome as a group, they feel a great sense of accomplishment at the end. So when the bikes are donated to cute kids at the end or when tons of food items are donated to the local food bank, the emotional impact is very high at the end.

A nice bonus is that when these activities are conducted at conventions or annual meetings, that feeling of pride and accomplishment tends to spill over and leave the participants thinking of the entire event as a major success.

So schedule a professional team building event for your next convention or annual meeting, and you will entertain as well as instruct your team!

Shared Experience Builds Teamwork

September 25th, 2011

This weekend, my family and I went camping with our neighbors. Keep in mind that, although I’m a country boy from rural Arkansas and spent many-a-weekend in a tent, I’ve become accustomed to king-sized beds and concierge lounges in my recent years. In fact, it was funny when my wife told me about the invitation…

“I know you’re not really the camping type,” she said.

I was offended… “I can skin a buck and run a trot line, I’ll have you know.”

Well, within a few hours I was back in my rustic roots. My neighbor pulled in his camper and expanded the sides to fit the queen beds. I plugged in my portable hotspot and unpacked my iPad. Just the great outdoors and a little Direct TV. (This is way better than I remember when I was a kid.)

Anyway, the point is that my wife and I have known the neighbors for a year or so now, but we got to know them much better throughout the last 48 hours. We talked about different things. We laughed together. It wad nice and relaxing.

It was a shared experience.

One of the reasons that team building events are so valuable is that they create a shared experience for the entire group. It is something that is not work. It’s not the normal stress and pressure at the office. It let’s the group get to know each other on a personal level.

Teams work much better together when the members of the team have strong friendships. Those strong friendships develop from the shared experiences. So when you schedule your next convention or annual meeting, make sure and look for ways to create a fun, shared experience for your team. Good team building events and activities like charity team building events can create that emotional impact in a shared experience.

Building a Team is like Hiking a Mountain

September 13th, 2011

At first glance you wouldn’t think building a team is like hiking a mountain. The last weekend of summer, Labor Day Weekend, I had an opportunity to hike Mt. Audubon in the Roosevelt National Forest with a group of friends. As much as I enjoy my job I make it a general rule to try not to think about work on the weekend. But listening to and observing my hiking mates I couldn’t help but think about how building a team is like hiking a mountain.

Be clear

Within our group we had a range of physical abilities from those who are accustomed to 10,000 foot elevation to those who are more used to sea level altitude. At the beginning of the hike it was important to be clear about expectations and what success meant for each person – it wasn’t necessarily reaching the 13,233 foot summit for everyone. That same good clear communication is vital in the workplace. It’s important for organizations to be clear about goals – from sales goals to safety goals. Building a team environment is enhanced when you celebrate milestones like many companies are doing with philanthropic teambuilding.

Be consistent

I noticed a lot of leap frogging during our five and half hour hike. Some hikers went in bursts passing us, then later we’d pass them as they were resting, and they’d pass us again after a recharge. Others took a “slow and steady wins the race” approach with a more even pace to the top. Like personality styles, there’s not a right or wrong way, it’s neither good nor bad – it’s just different. For example, when our clients learn about personality styles in our teambuilding workshop Rescue Bear, they see that each style adds value to the team. A Driver is a Driver and an Expressive is pretty consistently an Expressive. Once you come to understand and appreciate those differences the resulting communication will be consistent.

Be collaborative

Everybody brings something to the table. On our hike there was a person with a map and GPS, another person keeping an eye on the time and any impending weather to ensure we got to the top and back safely. Even the person with a quick joke to take our minds off how tired our feet are was an important member of the team. Good leaders realize that when building a team it’s important to draw in people with varied skills for peak collaboration.

When the day is done and you’re rounding the final switchback and the parking lot is in site you have the satisfaction of knowing you accomplished something great together. Every day at work won’t be like climbing a 13,000 foot mountain, but when building a team you can strive to be clear, be consistent and be collaborative to make your workplace a better environment.

This article was written by Colette Peterson. Colette is a Corporate Team Building Consultant with The Leader’s Institute headquartered out of Dallas Texas. You can reach Colette at 800-872-7830.

The Importance of Corporate Team Building in a Struggling Economy

September 5th, 2011

Corporate team building is important in a struggling economy. As we all know…These are tough economic times! During tough economic times it is the tendency of most companies to button down the hatches, hunker down, and hopefully wait out the storm. While this may feel like the safest thing to do it is actually the wrong thing to do and can in fact be detrimental. When things turn around…and they WILL turn around…you need to be positioned to take full advantage of the changing winds. During these tough times it has become too easy for employees or even whole departments within a company to feel under-appreciated which in turn leads to under-performance. This is a cancer that can spread quickly through a company and suddenly before you realize it…it shows up in the profit margin or lack thereof. The result can be devastating. There is a fix however, and it is actually quite simple. Invest in your own company.

One of the safest and rewarding investments in your own company is start doing corporate team building. Team building events are a great way to bring your people and departments together in order to help remind them they are all on the same team and it will take total team effort to pull through. It is through corporate team building that you can show your employees the most important part of your company is the people you hire. A team building event is a great way to bring your folks together, build trust, infuse energy, and improve communication. A positive environment, a sense of purpose, and a team culture is what will make the difference between having your company run like a highly tuned well functioning machine or sputtering and on the verge of breaking down.

Building and maintaining a positive team culture and atmosphere is every bit as important as paying the electrical bill. It’s not just something you should think about. It something you need to start on immediately and is crucial to your company coming through these tough economic not just barely hanging on for dear life but charging forward.

Written by Joe Jessop:
Joe is a corporate leadership consultant with The Leader’s Institute® headquartered in Dallas, Texas. The Leader’s Institute provides dynamic and high energy leadership training and corporate team building events for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and universities all over the country.

Astellas Builds Bikes for Boys and Girls Clubs of Dallas Texas in Team Building Event

September 5th, 2011

A fun, interactive Build-A-Bike Team Building Event in Dallas, Texas was sponsored by Astellas Pharmaceuticals with the end result being 14 new bikes donated to children from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas. The 7 boys and 7 girls that received the bikes enjoyed the moment along with the 90 people from Astellas Pharma Global Development, Inc. The action packed, fun event had the participants working in team and the teams working together to complete the tasks necessary to complete the bikes. The children received the bikes at the end of the program and when they entered everyone was full of cheers and worked top fit the bikes to each individual child.

After program there were many great comments on the event and how it was a great team building activity, as well as a lot of fun. The fun helped to reinforce the learning, and having the children present for the final part of the event was the icing on the cake. One of the comments was that in usual team building activities the learning is the main course and you don’t really realize the importance of the material until the end. But with this event, there was fun all the way through, and the learning made the event profitable. The Build-A-Bike Team Building Event combines the learning aspect along with the fun throughout the program so at the end it has been an enjoyable and profitable experience from beginning to end.

Thanks to Astellas and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas for a great team building and leadership encounter. As one of the participants said after the event, “I’ve been in team building and leadership training fro over 20 years and this is the best I’ve ever experienced.”

Sodexo Serves up Bicycles in a Build-a-Bike Team Building Event in Tulsa Oklahoma

September 5th, 2011

The Food Services division of Sodexo cooked up an idea to include a Build-a-Bike ® team building event in their regional meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Boys & Girls Clubs of Tulsa received new bicycles following the event. The regional management team set aside some time for community support in their quarterly meeting. The following video shows all the smiles that resulted.

Sodexo provides fresh, nutritious meals while working within the ethnic, cultural, and nutritional needs of their clients. They promote local, organic, and healthy ingredients grown through sustainable practices to keep their customers and their environment healthy and happy. The Build-a-Bike ® Team Building Event made some children happy as well.

Why is philanthropy important in team building?

August 24th, 2011

Increasingly businesses are finding that philanthropy is important in team building efforts as a component of their corporate social responsibility. Initially some may have held these types of workshops as a public relations move or for perception, but the reality is people who participate in philanthropic team building programs not only love it – they remember it along with the team building skills they learned. They get so much more out of it than if they had done an individual recreational activity.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy and USA TODAY released the results of a survey conducted recently to find out find out how much money the 300 largest U.S. corporations give to charity and to which causes. “Leading CEOs say they are interested in the deep connection between society obstacles and business obstacles, that they are intertwined,” says Margaret Coady, director of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), an international forum of business executives interested in improving corporate philanthropy.

One of the reasons philanthropy in team building is so important is because it is ‘hands on’. So often when we give to a charity we know it’s doing some good somewhere but we don’t really get to see the results of our giving. In team building workshops like Build-A-Bike or Rescue Bear, the receiving organization comes in at the end of the workshop. As one participant exclaimed, “It was the best event I’ve attended in my career — the result of having a bike to hand out at the end to the children was just so gratifying!!”

In 2010, Wal-Mart kicked off a five-year, $2 billion pledge to fight hunger in the U.S., which includes 1.7 billion pounds of food donations and $250 million in philanthropic support. According to Wal-Mart’s Leslie Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs who also oversees the foundation’s charitable work, “The only way we successfully deliver on these commitments is by engaging all parts of the business, whether it’s our associates who are volunteering their time to local food banks or the heads of each division who are weighing in on the strategy, or our foundation’s checks to our charity partners.” So the Ace Race team building workshop was a perfect tie-in for their summer intern program recently, where boxed and canned food items were donated to a local food bank.

Wal-Mart is not alone when it comes to taking this strategic approach to sharing the message about company values. Many of the nation’s largest companies are using philanthropy in team building as part of their University, much like are Goldman Sachs Deloitte. It sets the tone immediately with new hires that these companies go beyond saying that they’re making a difference to actually making a difference

Companies are taking their giving efforts more seriously than ever before as a strategic part of their business because they see the impact these efforts are having. When it comes to social engagement, the question now for companies is, ‘How do you break through?’ What better way than adding philanthropy to your next team building workshop.

This article was written by Colette Peterson. Colette is a Corporate Team Building Consultant with The Leader’s Institute headquartered out of Dallas Texas. You can reach Colette at 800-872-7830.