Team Building Without Competition

When you want your employees to work together as a group, perhaps breaking them into small teams to compete against each other isn't the best plan. After all, isn't the goal to focus on cooperating and not competing? Team building events should be less about rewarding winners, and more about ensuring that employees learn something that they can use in the workplace.

Team building is about appreciating individual strengths and differences, while building rapport and trust and creating a climate of communication. In a positive environment, employees interact confidently and courteously and relationships are built on goodwill. Colleagues are more willing to speak to one another, to listen more attentively, to ask questions and to offer valuable feedback. So what is the best way to create this type of climate? How about teaching employees to communicate effectively. 

Excellence in Speaking is an entertaining, interactive course where participants prepare short talks on simple topics. Our approach to public speaking combines professional coaching with peer review - and that's where the team building comes into play. Each participant functions in several roles: introducer, speaker, and coach. They not only learn how to deliver a presentation, they learn how to give and receive feedback to support their fellow classmates. 

"Team building was not the primary goal of our course, " says Anne-Boyd Moore, CEO of Ty Boyd Executive Communications & Coaching, "it's just a wonderful outcome of the experience. Everybody in the room is experiencing the same thing...rolling up their sleeves...becoming more vulnerable with each other...and when you begin to do that, when you share vulnerabilities with each other, you can't help but form a strong bond. And that's how a team is born."

The faculty at Ty Boyd will work directly with your organization to implement this course so that it aligns with your organization's cultural directives. When a group experiences this course in a team setting and collectively challenges the fear of presenting, bonds are created that can last forever...and nobody has to compete or suffer through the indignities of team building exercises. It's a win-win.