Team Cooking vs. Team Building
Team building is a concept whose time has arrived. Until and throughout most of the 1970's, businesses in the English speaking world were mostly focused on the concept of rewarding individual achievement and accomplishments. In the 1980's, changes began to occur in the international understanding of productivity. Larger corporations began to grasp the idea that well functioning teams were more critical for effective results than were simply individual accomplishments. In the decades of the 1980's and the 1990's then, the ideas surrounding Team Building were born and developed. Since the new millennium, the corporate culture has in fact revolved around the idea of the highly performing team.
Team Building covers a large variety of different types of activities utilized for improving the performance of a business or corporate team. Through a range of various practices, this is developed. Including basic bonding exercises all the way to more complicated and multiple day scenarios and retreats, Team Building is intended to create an optimally functioning team, employing group dynamic exercises, as well as group assessments.
Team building typically involves four different stages, whatever the actual underlying activity itself proves to be. In the first stage, the screening stage, the team leader looks to ascertain what the difficulties, challenges, and topics covered will be.
In the second, analytical stage, the team gathers information and performs an activity or exercise which will be employed in the third stage.
The intervention stage is the one where members of the team consider the data from the first stage to contemplate the team as a whole, themselves as an individual, and their part on the entire team. Effective practices in this stage allow team members to focus on the information learned and experience gained in order to create an effective plan of action. In the final stage of follow up, weeks after the activity is performed, the team leader convenes the team to ensure that the desired changes were followed through.
There are several different types of Team Building formats. Typically, they comprise communications activities, decision making activities, planning exercises, or trust building exercises. In communications activities, the goal is simply to put together an activity which demonstrates the essential nature of solid communications for reliable team performance. With decision making activities, a team is handed a problem which will necessitate that they work together creatively as a team in order to find the best solution. In planning exercises, the idea is to demonstrate the necessity of putting in place a good plan before finalizing a solution to a problem. Trust exercises seek to build up trust between the various members of the team.
Many different types of Team Building activities abound, including camping trips, obstacle courses, rock wall climbing, and even zoo based activities such as Zooquest (an advanced, modern day treasure hunt using GPS units to locate clues around the zoo) and Jungle Adventure (a fast moving, team building simulation which necessitates efficient strategy, leadership, communication, and collaboration), but one of the more innovative ones ever created involves Team Cooking.
Using cooking classes is an efficient and sensibly costing means of showing your team members the essential nature of striving together both individually and together in order to reach a common purpose, that of creating wonderful food. This fun building activity involves getting your employees away from their typical work environment and regimens and putting them in a true to life cooking situation. Here, under the watchful eyes of professional chefs, each individual learns to understand the importance of following directions well and of demonstrating creativity, on an individual level, as well as that of the team level.
In order to learn more about the fantastic Team Building exercise of Team Cooking, simply check out our team building cooking options.
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