How to Promote Creativity Through Team Building Activities
Friday, December 30th, 2016When teams function smoothly, innovation and creative problem-solving come naturally. But achieving team harmony can take time and effort. Team building videos teach and encourage such skills as building trust between team members, demonstrating respect at all times, using good communication, and creating a safe place to voice new ideas and even fail. Then, facilitating team building activities helps team members practice those skills and gain camaraderie while doing so.
When team members participate in collaborative team building activities, they learn to work together and generally get to know each other better. The activity can be something non-work-related like zip-lining or a scavenger hunt, or something relevant to the job, like a brainstorming session about a particular project or problem. Ultimately, the more trust team members feel towards each other, the more likely they are to feel secure being creative and offering new ideas and opinions.
For example, in the team building video The Magic of We, a team of leaders from Snapper Lawn Mowers came together on a Saturday morning to try and figure out, once and for all, why the parts on some of their lawn mowers simply weren’t fitting together after a recent factory consolidation and parts-supplier-overhaul. While there had been much conflict and finger-pointing leading up to the weekend session, once everyone was together on the plant floor and was tasked with the common goal of assembling four lawn mowers from scratch, the leaders – assembled from every department of the company – set aside differences and began to collaborate with, and trust, one another. As they did so, they became energized in their quest to figure out the hardware problems and creativity flowed.
Ultimately, the Snapper team was successful – not just in solving the tough puzzle that faced them, but in building creativity, problem-solving and collaboration skills. They learned that good teams:
- Encourage, share and explore questions and ideas.
- Generate options, act on one or more of them, and learn from each effort.
- Step outside the day-to-day environment and rules to encourage innovation.
- Make fun a part of the problem-solving process.
- Make problem-solving and creative idea-generation more hands-on.
For more about the Snapper Lawn Mower story, preview The Magic of We team building video. In addition to lessons on teamwork, the video also teaches viewers about communication, leadership, problem-solving, and even Lean Manufacturing.
To learn more about encouraging creativity in team members, Team Creativity profiles a team member who doesn’t express her ideas because she fears rejection. From her example, viewers then learn how to stop the “enemies” of creativity in team situations.