• Time: 2 - 4 hours
• Level: Introductory / Intermediate
• Participants: 5 - 15

• Core Team Skills
• Customer Focus
• Identifying Objectives
• Quality Standards

Over the Bridge is a great way to introduce and develop team skills. It is a two part activity: part one introduces the concepts, part two provides an opportunity for performance improvement.

Making a bridge and a vehicle is easy, but because the brief is deliberately ambiguous establishing and meeting the customers specification is a different matter. This emphasises the need for participants to clarify their objectives and develop plans before getting stuck into the task, but for some reason this is easier said than done..... just like being at work?

• Time: 1½ - 2½ hours
• Level: Introductory / Intermediate
• Participants: 6 - 12

• Planning before acting
• Revising plans as information is received
• Listening
• The impact of individuals' differing styles of verbal communication on others.

The task is straightforward (although people may see it differently). The problem is that to succeed everyone who is involved must work together, keep up to date with progress, offer ideas clearly and concisely, listen and respond positively to others'.

As all team members wear eye-shades throughout the task increasing their sensitivity and awareness of others. This heightened awareness emphasises the impact of differing personal styles, e.g. compliant, assertive, aggressive.

Facilitators at RAF Halton get to grips with Rectangle

• Time: 1½ - 2 hours
• Level: Advanced
• Participants: 8 -12

• Leadership
• Empowerment and 'letting go'
• Exploring and understanding the role and responsibilities of a team member
• Accepting and valuing others' ideas.

Initially designers and builders work in separate locations but they can communicate by 'fax'. The management team has the overview and the workers have all the materials and information to complete the task, they just need to be 'pointed in the right direction' and encouraged to get on with the dob in hand........

Why do the managers interfere and the workers acquiesce? ......... Perhaps old attitudes like "managers use their heads, workers use their hands" die hard.

All activities come complete with challenging review questions to help participants develop their personal learning

• Time: 1 - 2 hours
• Level: Intermediate
• Participants: 8 - 12 Participants

• Individual vs. team success
• Awareness of others' needs
• There are more ways to contribute to a team than providing ideas, answers and solutions
• Taking responsibility for the team
• Communicating the right thing in the right way when others are ready to receive the information.

Although this very powerful team working activity is done is silence it explores attitudes and approaches that influence effective communication.

Everyone has a task, so looking after yourself first is tempting, and personal achievement satisfying, but what if your short-term success prevents others (and therefore the team) from completing the overall task? Working with others is one thing, but undoing your own work to help someone else may be a different matter.

Team success demands that, despite the frustrations that may build as the problems unfold, individuals are; sensitive to what others are trying to achieve, aware of what everyone is actually doing, seeking ways to ensure that their personal actions enable the whole team to succeed .

Tensions mount: some individual tasks are complete but what about the team objectives?

• Time: 1½ - 2½ hours
• Level: Introductory / Intermediate
• Participants: 8 - 12

• Company vs. department objectives
• The impact of splitting a team across two locations: 'out of sight, out of mind'
• Involving people in decisions that affect what they have to do
• Thinking 'outside the box'
• Effective communications

Two halves of one team with different parts of the same task are separated by; a door, the knowledge that one team cannot divulge all its information, different work loads. Pressure and frustration build as effective communications diminish.

If only people could step back and think...... the task becomes so easy if the sub-teams work together solve the problem of developing effective communications rather than focusing on the detail of the task.

• Time: 2 - 3 hours
• Level: Intermediate / Advanced
• Participants: 8 - 24 working in two or four teams of 4 - 6

• Openness, honesty and trust
• Negotiating
• Communicating within and between teams
• Defining and realising success: beating others vs. doing as well as you can
• Inter-team rivalry

This inter-team activity takes the concept of 'prisoners dilema' (if I help you escape first, can I trust you to help me escape afterwards?) to a new level: no matter how hard teams try, one must win unless both settle for a very poor performance.

The activity demands effective analysis, clear and effective communication, leadership between teams, planning, building and retaining trust, negotiating and.....

• Time: 8 - 20 minutes
• Level: Introductory
• Participants: 3 - 12

• Break the ice
• Energise
• Introduce the basic concepts and skills of team working
• Stimulate thought

10 short activities that can introduce 'team concepts' as well as 'breakimg the ice' or energising a flagging group. All involve lots of action and most an element of competition. Each is quite different, and despite being quick, will raise salient points about the way individuals in the group are working with each other.

The manual includes; a matrix to summarise the features of each activity, an overview of how to use the activities, facilitator's notes and re-usable briefs for each task, learning review worksheets.