Team Building. Ice Breakers.

Ice Breakers

Picture the following situation — you may have already experienced it. Your company calls you to take part in a Team Building day. You're not entirely sure what a Team Building activity is, and you've only been at the company a few months, so you don't really know most people yet. You look at your colleagues' faces and can sense the same emotions: nerves, uncertainty, a certain amount of stress. Their movements seem heavy, perhaps from the tension caused by lack of information — what is this "Team Building" thing? What are we going to do?

The first step any facilitator or trainer, an expert in Team Building days, must take is to melt away this jumble of insecurities, fear of looking silly, expectations, and, in general, small obstacles that need to be overcome as soon as possible to create the right atmosphere for fun and learning.

The goal is to get people touching, laughing, hugging, feeling part of the group — you need to break down their usual structure, get them to forget their work role, act naturally, and generate high levels of oxytocin, lowering blood cortisol levels, so they feel more relaxed, in harmony with their colleagues.

And we achieve this through a series of very short, but highly effective icebreaker dynamics, thanks to their strong emotional content. The best dynamics are ones where we try to get people touching, staying close together, laughing, and, above all, needing everyone's contribution to overcome the challenge set.

An example of an icebreaker dynamic would be "Ants on the Tree". We place planks barely 10 cm wide on the ground and have participants climb onto them. They can't touch the floor, they have no verbal communication, and through mime they need to line up in order of company seniority. This causes a lot of laughter and fun, and to move along the planks, hugging becomes unavoidable. It's a guaranteed success.

This is a vital, essential part — if we fail to break down their usual structure, the team building day will be a failure. Choosing the right setting also helps enormously, which is why we usually choose venues far from the workplace, to pull participants out of their work context, away from their work roles, breaking down their structure, so they feel free to be themselves.

At Kaizen Coaching and Team Building we take care of every detail so your Team Building day is a success — we've spent 10 years running the best Team Building days you can imagine, both in Madrid and Barcelona.