Team Bonding Activities

Team bonding activities outside the realm of your team’s every day challenges, and without any direct connection to your team’s reality, do not provide lasting value and impact to your team members.

The bonding activities you decide to use may be bonding, but the point of these activities should not be mere bonding per se, but rather, the point of these activities must be the improvement of your team functioning in order to allow your team members to make the best possible decisions every time, and to allow you to optimize the execution effectiveness of the decisions your team members make.

Along this line of thought, the best team bonding activities that I know come from the practice – on the part of the team leader – of authenticity (integrity, humility and vulnerability), trust, honesty, and the ability to manage team conflict.

In the decision-making process, information is the main ingredient, but your team members won’t open up, speak up their minds, and put everything on the table, if your team members don’t have enough trust to practice real-in-your-face candor – and without candor, there won’t be real information to debate about, in order for your team to make the best possible decision.

And to generate trust within your team, the team leader must be authentic, meaning, the team leader must relentlessly practice integrity (nobody trusts a person lacking integrity), humility (it’s impossible to unearth reality and learn from it if the team leader is somebody who has a big ego), and vulnerability (human beings tend to trust a lot more individuals who show themselves as they really are – without any masks).

It doesn’t matter what team bonding activities you use, as long as they reinforce these qualities that have nothing to do with touchy-feely let’s-touch-each-other kind of stuff. On the contrary, these human qualities have everything to do with bottom line results.

Regardless of the team bonding activities that you decide to use for your team, you may want to integrate them with the managerial decision making process we describe on this page, so that your team will consistently make the best possible decisions – every time.

Bonding is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end – the end being decision-making and execution effectiveness in order to reach desired results.

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To learn more about the skills you need to manage the performance of your direct reports, go to our Management Skills page.

To learn more about the skills you need to lead the performance of your entire organization, go to our Leadership Skills page.

To keep on learning about other useful skills, go back to the previous page, or click here.

If you would like your team and / or organization to learn effective team bonding activities through our speaking or consulting services, please click on this link.