Yesterday I referenced Dryer, Dryer and Dryer’s, Team Building: Proven Strategies for Improving Team Performance. Of course, I was being a bit fatuous in my post yesterday but for those of you who are not familiar with this book, it offers a gold mine of useful information in terms of improving and evaluating any team-building process you are involved with.

No doubt, I’ll refer to this tome many more times on the blog, however, I wanted to quickly mention the Triple-D’s (as I shall refer to them from now on) Four Cs of Team Performance. They are:

Context – The need for teamwork, type of team needed and the systems that support the team

Composition – Team members’ skills, experience and motivation

Competencies – The team’s ability to problem-solve, communicate, make decisions, etc.

Change – The team’s ability to monitor its performance and make changes as needed

The usefulness of the Four Cs are immediately apparent as factors that must be understood and managed in order to produce a team that functions at a high level. However, beyond that, they are also an incredibly useful tool for you to use when selecting a team building event for your awayday.

At Eventus we are often surprised (bemused, annoyed, frustrated, etc.) with what occasionally passes for team building in the marketplace. We take it as self-evident that a team building activity must address the Four-Cs for it to be of use to the participants. Next time you’re selecting a team building event, take a moment to evaluate your options in light of the Four-Cs.

Does your proposed activity:

– Necessitate a team dynamic, or is it simply an activity that all your team members will be participating in at the same time? This is a hugely important distinction to make if you want a meaningful team building experience.

– Allow for different skills held by team members to be utilised during the event? This doesn’t mean there should be an IT element and a sales element and a procurement element to the event. What it does mean is that the task should allow each team members problem-solving skills (and style) to come into play.

– Ensure that the team members will be reliant on each other to complete the task? If the team members are not reliant on each other to communicate their thoughts about how to achieve the task, design a team approach, and incorporate all team members to achieve the goal, then how is it forwarding their notions of working as a team?

– Include within it adequate time for the team members to reflect on how they are doing and, at the end, how they have done? The process of completing the event should naturally generate all sorts of discussion about how the team performed: when were they most effective, when did they feel least efficient, what ways of working can be carried back to the workplace, etc.

For events that incorporate the Four-Cs (and are a lot of fun to boot!) check our Evenuts‘ great team building activities. Or get in touch with us at our website to find out what we can do for you!