7 Simple Team Building Exercises

7 Simple Team Building Exercises By Mark Polman

Team building is not only important in business. It is also good for sporting teams, children and pretty much anywhere else you require people to work together as a team. It can also be therapeutic for people who have a social anxiety or find it hard to connect with others. Following are a few basic team building exercises.

#1 – Pipe line.

This is a simple one to start off with. Each person gets a piece of pipe. They must use the pipe to transfer a marble or small ball around from person to person. The ball mustn’t touch the ground and the players must not use their hands. If they accomplish this easily at first then tell them to do it again within a specific time frame.

#2 – Egg Transporter.

Each participant has a spoon. Similar to pipe line except you are using an egg and a spoon instead of a marble and a piece of pipe. This can be played a race with teams competing to see who gets the egg back to the first person. The objective is to pass the egg from person to person using just the spoon.

#3 – Mine field.

Get people to split up into pairs. One person wears a blindfold while the other person is the guide. The guide must guide the person wearing the blind fold to a goal. Set up a few obstacles between where they start and the goal. The obstacles are easily depicted with witches hats or marker cones. To add a competitive aspect (for fun) time each pair and add a few seconds to their time if they hit an obstacle.

#4 – Three leg race.

This is another activity that requires people to work in pairs. The pair stands next to each other and tie their middle legs together to give them three legs. Then the pair’s race! This promotes coordination with their partner because their middle leg (which are essentially two legs tied together) must work in unison in order to pick up speed.

#5 – Four team tug-of-war.

Using four teams instead of two and a rope that has spreads out to have four ends instead of just two. It is much more strategy dependent and a great way to make team building work fun.

#6 – Zoom.

A pretty fun game that is reliant on the team’s imagination as a whole. The group is given a set of pictures (may or may not be sequential) that they then have to build a story around. There is more than one version of this game. The version I describe here is probably my favourite because it is great for people who work in a creative industry.

#7 – Great Egg Drop.

Eggs make for the best team building tool it seems. The idea is to create something as a team out of various objects to protect the egg from breaking if dropped. Part of successful team building is centred on people working together. The other aspect revolves around people finding how they can best benefit a group as an individual.