TEAM BUILDING with CARBs

There are plenty of nutritionists and health professionals out there that will tell you that too many CARBs are bad for you. But when it comes to the health of your team, we say, the more CARBs the better. But before you break out the bread and the pasta for your team, we better take a look at the CARBs that ARE beneficial for your team.

The CARB Model for Teambuilding.

• Commitment to the team and each other
• Alignment and goal agreement
• Relationships among team members
• Behaviours and skills

So now I bet your thinking why specifically these things? How are they great for teams in abundance?

Well let's begin with COMMITMENT. Commitment is a very powerful thing. Without it, teams aren't as unified or not dedicated to a project, and so they are not as successful. This is because people are busy, they have to juggle lots of tasks and priorities. With only so much focus and energy to give, without a high level of commitment, team members will not be fully participative and work effectively on the team.

There are two parts to this commitment. People must feel a commitment to the team and its purpose, and they must have some commitment to the individuals on the team, believing them and their contributions to the team.

You must remember though, there is a huge difference between being committed to the people on a team and being committed to the work and purpose of the team itself. BOTH ARE REQUIRED! Some of our other CARB elements may aid in the development of commitment, but recognising the importance of commitment itself is an important first step.

Next we have ALIGNMENT AND GOAL AGREEMENT. When looking at this, teams should consider the following: 

1. Start at the beginning - make sure the goals and strategies are set. The team needs to understand why their work matters and how they can make a positive impact.
2. Generate conversation - help individuals and the team develop meaning and purpose. Help them understand how they can create work that matters.
3. Get the team's help - when people have the chance to shape the goals of the team, and when given an opportunity to have input into those decisions, they will have greater agreement goals.
4. Provide a connection - teams need someone in leadership 'above' them that can provide support and resources - someone who can answer questions and keep them on track.
5. Make them accountable - if the alignment is clear and the goals set, then the team needs to be held accountable for results.

It's easy to see how these steps can help a team succeed. But it's also much more than that. People want to belong to something that matters; they want things to believe in. But more than helping them to deliver a desired result, this gives them the sense of clarity, meaning and DIRECTION that helps them to overcome any hurdles that come into their path.

Now to think about RELATIONSHIPS among team members.The usual cliche crops up time and time again when it comes to relationships and team building - 'we need people to get to know each other better. Once we have done that, we will be fine!' This is a terrible and dangerously limiting view of teams.

That isn't to say that the relationships between team members don't matter, they do. When teams that have good relationships also have plenty of the other CARBS, then team performance can SOAR!

The best designed relationship-focused team building events do more than create laughs, they create learning! These events help people do more than get to know each other, they provide opportunities for teams to: 

1. Learn each other's strengths - strong teams not only like each other, they know each other's strengths
2. Find ways to capitalise on those strengths - the best team building activities give people a chance to be themselves, without all the structure and trappings of the work place, helping others see how those strengths can be tapped by the team
3. Get comfortable with asking for help - highly effective team members are willing to ask for help, regardless of their role on the team
4. Initiation processes - the application of processes that requires teams to agree on norms will have greater success with teams that change membership frequently
5. Role definition - team members need to understand where they fit in and what their roles are. 

Also, being a successful member of a team requires different BEHAVIOURS AND SKILLS than are required of an individual. While the list of skills and behaviours that support a successful team is long, here is a short list to get you thinking about the types of behaviours and skills to look for when creating a team, or developing an existing team.

1. Strong technical skills and competencies - having the subject matter knowledge, industry perspective or specific skills the team needs, is critical
2. Ability to trust others - the best team members are willing to start from a position of basic trust in their teammates. this trust can deepen and grow, but the most effective team members are willing to assume the best and work together more effectively from the beginning.
3. Comfortable and competent at group problem solving - effective team members know how to work together to solve problems, how to listen to the ideas of others, to ask questions without being condescending and to make sure that the strengths of each team member are taken into account in the problem solving process.
4. Willingness to continually learn - for teams to succeed each individual on the team needs to continuously improve their individual skills.

So there you have it, CARBs, CARBs and more CARBs for your team and they will be healthy in no time - but in order to get those CARBs rolling, why not try a team building activity with your team - and get them on the road to success!

Teamwork and Team Building '18 Hole Course'

Try working your way round the '18 Hole Teamwork Course', from the Resource Management Consulting Group, with your team - how many 'holes in one' can you get?

Hole 1: Put the team first – ‘there is no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit’

Hole 2:  Share team information openly – ‘ the word communication comes from the Latin ‘communico’ meaning to share’

Hole 3:  Be part of the solution – be prepared to work hard!

Hole 4: Seek first to understand – understand your teammates and support their needs

Hole 5: Respect other opinions – Agree to disagree without becoming disagreeable - a collective of ideas is better than none at all.

Hole 6: Ask and encourage questions – questions open our minds to continuous learning and unlimited discovery, and foster deeper understanding and healthier relationships.

Hole 7: Make rational decisions

Hole 8: Eliminate internal competition – pit team members against standards of excellence, not each other.

Hole 9: Build trust with integrity – trust is a learned behaviour, as is distrust.

Hole 10: Treat one another with respect - in order for people to effectively put the ‘we’ in front of the ‘me’, they need to feel confident that the ‘me’ matters. They need to feel good about who they are and what they offer.

Hole 11: Commit to excellence – share the risk required in generating maximum returns and pursuing victory together.

Hole 12: Be accountable for your actions – there is no substitute for personal ownership, responsibility and self-control.

Hole 13: Accept mistakes and learn – We have to dare to get a hit, recognising that striking out is part of the same process.

Hole 14: Learn continuously – information has never been more abundant. Make growth a top priority. The only barrier to lifelong learning is you. Get past you own ego and self-imposed restrictions. Start today.

Hole 15: Promote interdependence – in the 1970s the driving force for organisational change was cost. In the 1980s it was quality. In the 1990s it was speed. Today it’s process, the combination of multiple interdependent functions.

Hole 16: Be patient and persevere

Hole 17:  Pull the weeds –  Give everyone some room to grow. Teamwork is a value, honour it.

Hole 18: Lessons from geese – if we share a common direction and a sense of teamwork, we can get where we’re going more quickly and easily because we are travelling on the lift of one another.

How far did you and your team get? If you fancy challenging your team a bit more - why not take a look at our Team building Events and see what we can offer you!

How to Build a Team

Sorry to burst your bubble if you were hoping for a quick fix, but there’s actually no ideal approach to building a team. Every situation and every group of people are different, and so too are the ways in which they come together and build their team.

A team must learn, as it’s developing, it's own preferred approach to how it will function in getting the work done. What’s important to remember is that performance is at the core of building a strong team.

Adapted from Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith’s the Wisdom of Teams, there is an eight point frame work for teams to be upwardly mobile in performance levels and be well built as a team.

Urgency - Everyone on the team must believe that the team has urgent and worthwhile purposes. The greater the urgency and purpose, the more likely that a real team will emerge.

 Skills not Personalities – effective teams need complimentary skills. The three broad types of skills are: technical, problem-solving and interpersonal. What’s critical for the potential team is to achieve the right balance in skills. But it’s not necessary for members to have all the technical skills immediately. Instead, the key is to have the needed skills at the team’s start up and the ability for members to acquire additional skills later on. Key skills that should be learned at the start up include interpersonal, problem solving and team skills.

·         Sufficient Time – Time is vital in a team’s development. Time should be given over to meetings and discussions in order for a team to get to know one another.

·         Behaviour Rules – teams will have a set of rules to guide them – a code of conduct. Without rules, it’s impossible for a group or potential team to transcend to a real team. At the early stage, rules include: attendance, confidentiality, open discussion, constructive disagreement and a fair work load. These rules will then encourage participation, openness, commitment and trust.

·         Goals – creating short term goals helps to create some momentum to propel the team forward. It ensures that the goals are reasonable and can be reached fairly and quickly. It also acts as a great motivator.

·         Information – constantly ensuring new information gets across is important as some teams can tend to block this out otherwise. Giving a team new information serves as a catalyst to the members to help them refocus on the team’s performance. It’s also dangerous for members to assume that they already hold all the necessary information.

·         Interaction – a team should spend time with each other both inside and outside of work. This is especially important during the early development stages. It promotes a bonding element. A conscious effort must be made.

·         Recognition – achieving a high level of performance is a team’s ultimate reward. But before that’s reached, it’s vital to recognise the team for its progress and achievements. Doing this keeps the team’s members focused and motivated.





      I hope this has proven to be a useful read for you! If you would like to read some more of our free team resources, please click here

TeamBuilding for Conferences - Theatre Style

It has long been an axiom of the conference and event industry that to properly engage an audience from start to finish, ice breakers and other sessions of team building activities are essential. They help to provide definition between sessions and they are an opportunity for people to relax in the middle of what can be long periods of concentration.

From a purely logistical point of view, the best seating arrangement to listen to key-note speakers and observe presentations for large audiences - common to such events - is, without doubt, theatre style. This format produces an environment with universally good views of the stage, and a natural focus is created, without the need to direct an audience’s attention.

However, placing large amounts of people in rows and rows of tightly packed seats can present problems in itself. All of a sudden, any sort of movement whatsoever, becomes very difficult, and space, both per person and in general becomes quite scarce. Most team building activities therefore become difficult if not impossible to do and this is where a great event from Eventus Training and Events comes in!

Marble run is a simple but effective exercise in which each person is provided with a length of pipe or gutter. Many different profiles and sizes are used, and the aim of the challenge is to form pipelines along which marbles can run. The easiest pipelines to form run along rows however column pipelines can also be attempted or row pipelines can be combined together – it all depends on the time available.

The Marble Run is a great Energiser, and not only is it active and fun but the pipelines created are symbolic of everyone contributing and linking together to do a great job. This message is easy to link in to most conference themes, including the most common of all - working together/’one team’.

One of the strengths of this activity comes in its flexibility - initially participants find it tricky to get the marble to run smoothly without holdups; however with practice they soon become proficient. Once they become confident in what they are doing, the level of complexity can be increased, and teams have an even harder proposition to conquer. Some teams exchange pipe/gutter between team members to make the connections easy to manage (for example small to large is easy, whilst large to small is much harder to get right). The marbles must finish in tin buckets – and when they arrive they deliver a satisfying “clunk”. The activity can be concluded with a race between teams, and the awarding of a prize, or recognition for the top performing pipeline team.

In short, The Marble Run Conference Energiser from Eventus is a fun, engaging, and timely activity, suitable for groups in theatre style seating – and to top it all, it delivers the important learning points about teamwork and your conference themes! Why not book it now!

CONTACT US NOW for more information! The Events Team are always happy to help!

Team building and Teamwork

It would appear that in order to be an effective team there must be an incremental element of teamwork. However, many teams still believe that simply being labelled as part of a team is all there is too it. 

WRONG. 

In order to ensure the development of a productive team, there should be a high level of commitment to teamwork and an understanding of what that involves.

Each team is different, and so will carry different levels of sustained teamwork. But what makes the difference between a ‘group’ and a ‘team’?

Teamwork is talked about widely in companies and organisations, but often with little understanding of what it means. Employers typically want immediate results, with teams that are formed and ready to go overnight.

There are two essential elements to becoming a team. One is that the team has a common purpose and the second is interdependence. Without both of these present, the group will never become a team; it’s impossible.

It’s essential that the members of a team be committed fully to their common purpose. A common purpose takes time to develop, but it gives the team an identity.

There are six elements to consider when thinking if your group is a team or has the potential.

·         * The size of your group is important – is it an environment for good communication? Are discussions constructive? Do people understand their roles?

·         * The skills needed to achieve your goals – think about interpersonal, technical and problem solving skills. Are there any skills that are missing? Are people willing to learn and to help each other?

·         * A clear and meaningful objective – do you have a team specific objective or is the company as a whole? Does your team think it is important to them?

·         * Specific performance goals – do they encompass the team as a whole, or the leader, or the company? Are they easily measured?

        * A common approach – are people able to be recognised for their contributions? Are members openly able to interact? Are new ideas encouraged?

·         * Mutual accountability – do members know what they are accountable for individually and collectively?

Ultimately teams are striving for a common purpose and interdependency as the key ingredients to the make-up of their team. The rest comes with commitment and effort. 


So where does team building come into it?


Team building gives teams the opportunity to identify and begin understanding their common goals and purpose. It gives them the chance to build upon their interdependent skills and identify the strengths within the team that will help them achieve their goals.


As we have said in previous articles, team building is not the whole solution to a problem, nor will it give immediate full results - but it is a beginning. It's the idea of runner at the starting blocks, it gives the propulsion and support for a team to being its journey. It's a catapult waiting to fire and drive teams towards their goals. 

On its own, it may not achieve much, it works better in a partnership.


Like a team - it strives to reach the end goal.


 Take a look at our catalogue of team building events and start your team on their journey NOW!

Team Building Event

New teams and existing teams - no matter the context a team is a team, and all teams need different ways in which to pull together and move forward towards their goals and objectives. It doesn’t matter if your team is a picture of unity or riddled with conflict – all teams need outlets for developing new ideas, insights into their relationships and options of ways in which they can come together. 

So why choose a team building event?

1. Engage your team – Teams need to focus, they need to know what they’re aiming for and not just be told about it. By using a team building event to engage your team you are allowing them the space to grow as one unit and experientially learn together.

2. Learn what your team needs – watching your team tackle a challenge together will give an understanding of the relationships within a group, how they work best, what needs work and what drives them to actually be a team.

3. Shared Goals – there may be a goal you wish to achieve with your team, but do they really see it as their goal. A team building event can help teams take a step back and understand how their efforts are feeding into larger objectives.

4. Your team vision – looking at your teams work processes and what they need to achieve means that there should be a vision you hold for the group. A team building event is fantastic for sharing that vision with your team (or even allowing them to create one for themselves).

5. Have Fun! – All teams need to have high morale; a happy team usually means a productive team. Giving your team a chance to work together outside the office environment will help them to not only engage with your vision and your shared goals but also to engage with each other.

In all honesty a team building event will not end or solve all your problems – it’s merely a starting point for teams to progress. When done well, a team building event holds the key to a successful team future, one where progression and unity are top.

When training for a marathon, you can’t just train for one day and then do it – it takes time, patience, dedication (and obviously more than one training session) - same goes for teams. 

You can’t just expect one event or one session to produce what you want – but a team building event is certainly a good first step!

If you would like more information on any of our events, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us! We are always happy to help!

Conference Team Building

We have all experienced the same scenario – another year, another boring annual conference. On one end of the scale you have managers who aren’t comfortable speaking to large audiences, so much so they end up sticking to a script like an animatronic robot. And on the other end you have those who alternatively seem to relish the challenge of inflicting death by PowerPoint, with slide after endless slide of quotes, graphs and objectives. It’s no wonder that instead of informing and invigorating your workforce, conferences can easily do the reverse.

Imagine instead a world where your employees actually looked forward to your conference. Where they actively listened and engaged with the material at hand and each other. Where they went away with a clear feeling of ‘this is what we have to do this year to be successful’. Wouldn’t that be a great world to be in? Yet this is not impossible to achieve, in fact quite the opposite -the simple introduction of a Team Building Event can make all the difference; it can be a game-changer.

In the place of a standard sitting and listening format, universal to conferences across different companies and industries alike, the use of a Team Building Activity can transform the atmosphere at a conference; getting people active and communicating, the simple challenge of completing a task can unify and motivate. And they need not comprise the entire event - Team Building Activities can be used to break up other sessions, reinvigorating delegates and varying their experience. 

To achieve the maximum impact from using a Team Building Event at your conference, the final step is to simply weave the themes or messages you are trying to convey, throughout the team building activities utilised and all of a sudden, your team are learning through doing – also known as experiential learning. experiential learning is one of the best tools when focusing on team management. it is the first step on a teams journey. 

Experiential learning can be such a powerful tool as it conveys a message and reinforces it all at the same time and in such a manner that can get through more than any graph or PowerPoint slide would; in short, using an active and engaging method of introducing your key message for the year can make all the difference to it actually being heard instead of listened to.

And the benefits don’t stop there; Team Building Activities can act as Icebreakers as well as Energisers. Not only can they help to create a team more enthused about their work, but they can help them work better together. Through the breaking down of barriers and the building of new friendships and relationships, Team Building and Training Exercises can significantly and dramatically increase your teams overall performance.

And then only two questions remain – have you booked your Team Building Event for your next conference yet, and if not, WHY ON EARTH NOT??? Contact us NOW for more information!