Once a group bonds over their common experiences, they can also recognize that they are creating a new shared experience by working for the same company. Through storytelling exercises, your team can figure out what they all have in common, regardless of age, race, gender, education level, or anything else that might initially cause people to think that nobody at work relates to them. Some experiences are universal, but often it takes a lot of listening to realize which experiences those are. When a group of people share enough of their lives with each other, they become part of one another’s in-group-and trust comes a lot more naturally. Through sharing their personal stories in a group storytelling activity, your team members allow each other to see pieces of their lives, naturally inviting their colleagues to share related experiences. To combat this, you can have your team do trust falls all day (if you want them to bond over complaining about it) or you can invite them to do what humans have always done with their in-groups: share stories. Starting that relationship off with mistrust quickly leads to animosity, which can throw a huge wrench into the workflow of everyone involved. In a workplace, any part of our job that relies on somebody else requires a certain amount of trust that the other person will follow through. That instinct never truly went away (as evidenced by many of the social justice causes around the world today), and we all still tend to reserve our deepest trust for those who we consider members of our in-group. L – Lots of TrustĪnciently, human survival often banked on trust of their community and suspicion or avoidance of those who were outside of it. It’s a lot easier to ask somebody to clarify the wording on their latest email if they’re someone with whom you regularly exchange updates about your pets. Storytelling for team building training creates an opportunity for your people to make those connections with each other in a way that makes working together feel more natural. However, in a more detached work environment where you aren’t sharing an office space with your colleagues all day, the chance may never arise for these details to come up organically. Those details about another person’s life are things you tend to learn from spending a lot of time with them. If those coworkers are one and the same, the two of you probably make a killer team. If you work in sales, you might have an okay connection with the coworker who always generates the best leads for you-but you probably have an even better connection with the coworker who went to the same college as you or who shares your passion for fly fishing. Let’s take a look at what makes it so sticky-and along the way give you a few examples of storytelling activities for adults. It just so happens that the most universal bond activator is personal storytelling for team building. Fortunately, the potential for each of those already exists in your team, and-like many powerful adhesives-they simply need to be activated to show their bonding power. It’s clear that team building is important, but it’s still just as difficult as it ever was to figure out how to do it effectively.Ī strong team needs a few things to hold it together: Good connections, Lots of trust, Unity, and Empathy (or G.L.U.E. If the standard team-building fare didn’t work when everyone was together in the office, it’s certainly not going to do any better now that half your team is being patched through on a laggy webcam. Now more than ever though, with so many offices becoming remote or hybrid, it’s vital to find the magic component that can hold a team together over any distance-not to mention help them find value in the work they do together in an increasingly detached work environment. Maybe the more outgoing workers still had chats in the break room, the shy workers stayed isolated at their desks, and nobody really seemed to come away with any greater connection to each other or the values of the company. Perhaps, as an owner or HR manager, you’ve even tried implementing some sort of team-building training yourself that just ended up feeling forced and didn’t really impact the relationship dynamic of the office much. We all know it’s important for a team to connect and work well together, but if you’ve been in the working world long enough, then you’ve almost certainly participated in team-building training that widely missed the mark. The idea of workplace team building has had a pretty rough go over the last few decades. Be honest: the idea of storytelling for team building probably sparks about as much interest in you as the last “team building” activity you had to participate in.
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