4 Powerful Team Building Exercises

The vast majority of work today is done in teams. And that makes collaboration and teamwork all the more important. But we have a tendency to think of team building exercises as one-and-done events-ropes courses or personality tests that happen every so often, usually if there’s extra budget that needs to be spent before the end of the fiscal year.

But team building isn’t an activity, it’s a habit. Team building happens every day as norms of behavior are established. Team building exercises, if they’re to be truly meaningful, need to take this reality into account.

In this article, we’ll outline four powerful team building exercises that can be done on a regular basis, and ideally are habitual, in order to build your best team ever.

Team Charters

The first team building exercise is the team charter-sometimes called a working agreement, group norms, frequently unasked questions, or a declaration of interdependence. The idea behind this exercise is that everyone has certain taken-for-granted assumptions about how collaboration and communication should happen. But since those assumptions are taken for granted, they’re not communicated. And much of the conflict and friction that happens on a team happens when someone violates someone’s else unstated assumptions.