Cosa aspettarsi da un team building? Ne abbiamo parlato tante volte, abbiamo la nostra visione e la nostra filosofia.

Our goal is the creation of special and unique activities that allow participants to make that day memorable while cementing relationships and initiating new personal connections.

We want everyone to feel part of the group, ensuring that each individual has the opportunity to stand out for their own skills and peculiarities.

For once, however, I want to talk to you about what team building is not—a sort of manual of things to absolutely avoid when organizing team building.

The first piece of advice is to put yourself in the participants’ shoes; what may appear beautiful and intriguing when looking at a project as a whole then translates into practical and real actions that every guest must perform. Well, the commandment “do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you” applies!

It seems like a cliché, and in some ways it is, but in ten years of team building, we have seen and heard the strangest and most imaginative things—some very beautiful, others somewhat less so…. We must put ourselves in the shoes of those who will have to perform the actions to fully understand what each of them will do, to understand how it feels, and if the final purpose is clear. Sometimes we have them create things that may make little sense individually, but then, by putting together all the work from all the groups, there is a surprise twist. I am thinking, for example, of the Fresco; each team creates a painting, respecting only certain areas that we have marked on each canvas. At the end of the activity, by putting all the paintings together in the established order, we obtain a famous work of art, albeit revised and corrected by the participants.

Another extremely interesting activity from this point of view is Team Beat; you enter the world of music and talk about percussion. A beautiful and stimulating activity that consists of playing one or more instruments; our trainers will turn you into an orchestra, and so even a simple “triangle” becomes fundamental to the group’s sound. But beware: this activity cannot last more than ninety to one hundred and twenty minutes! After a certain amount of time, once the initial excitement has worn off, the activity risks becoming tedious and unengaging.

Let us now talk about Theater; here the situation is very different. Each participant can, in fact, adjust their level of involvement and participation as they wish, carving out the role they prefer that keeps them in their comfort zone. This team building is highly recommended and does not fall at all into that category of risky activities, the kind where you say: “my people won’t do these things”…. We have organized it a thousand times and always with great success, precisely because it gives everyone the freedom to expose themselves or not.

The final chapter concerns motivational activities; I am thinking of firewalking or breaking an arrow with one’s throat, etc. Well, all these activities have a very high (sometimes even excessive) emotional impact and have the specific purpose of creating strong motivation to overcome personal limits. All of this does not sit well with the objective of team building; it is clear that these are activities that act on the individual rather than on a working group.