Team Building Seminar

How do I ensure that my team building seminar is effective?

First and foremost, you need to need to make sure that the team building seminar is adapted to your special interests. The best seminars are given by those companies with good experience in experiential learning. There needs to be a good mixture of serious learning and fun built into the seminar as well. Team building can take place over periods of half a day up to around four days and what is achieved within them depends on what you want. Do you want to form a new team? Do you want to use it for specific conflict resolution? Do you want it to be a support for informal networking? There must be some aim.

A good seminar provider will not just turn up on the day hoping to deliver what you want. Instead they will spend time working with you to create a plan that responds to the issues and needs of your team. You should be involved in the selection and scheduling of specific activities and can arrange pre-program surveys, group meetings and interviews so that realistic expectations can be set, outcomes can be targeted and a format can be identified before anything else happens.

Team building seminars can accommodate groups of less than 10 up to several hundred. Large groups would obviously be organised into smaller groups for activities. Some seminar formats work much better when you have smaller groups, and some work better when you have larger groups. Some it doesn't matter. You do need to make sure that those organizing your seminar know the group numbers.

Something you may be worried about is what happens when the people who are going on your team building seminar don't believe it will work for them? Well, you should find an organizer who relishes the prospect of dealing with sceptics. Most good team building seminars will take on the cynics and leave them satisfied and more than often quite relieved. All that people need to do to have a chance of it working is to be willing, to show up and have a commitment to team working.

Team building seminars work best when you are engaged in experiential learning. This is when your team works on problems that need solving and has discussions on focused issues. Team member behaviour will typically mirror and even highlight people's work-based strengths and weaknesses.

The idea is to give the individual members of the team the motivation to follow-through on what they learned and experienced. This should really be planned for so that after the programme people are clear on what they have to do. Perhaps you could book in multiple team building seminars to have checkpoints in the process.