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Team Building exercises

This page provides details of some team building exercises that can be used with teams to improve relationships or their performance. The exercises can be used by anyone, but they are designed primarily with MTR-i practitioners in mind.

Team building: 360 degree feedback	This exercise is designed to identify and reduce conflicts that may arise in a team as a result of conflicting expecatations about each others' roles. It involves using team role terminology as the basis for discussing the perceptions team members have of each other. Each person gives feedback to others on the type of roles they see them performing, and they receive feedback themselves. This is a relatively 'safe' form of 360, and can act as a warm-up or lead-in to more constructive(/negative) or difficult forms of feedback.
Team roles and personal preferences	This exercise provides a structure to enable team members to discuss whether the roles they are undertaking accord with their preferences - and whether roles can be changed to fit their preferences better. This requires use of a personality type questionnaire, such as the MBTI, TDI, PTI, Insights, Personality Profiler or similar.
Team strengths (and how to build on them)	This exercise is focused on the collective behaviours of the team. It helps them identify the areas in which they are investing most of their effort, thereby identifying their likely strengths and enabling them to build on those strengths.
Team weaknesses (and how to mitigate their negative impact)	This exercise helps the team to identify important areas that may be weaknesses as a result of team dynamics or group think. This could be areas where they may be paying less attention, or it could be areas where they pay too much attention and have become rigid or inflexible in their team approach. The exercise also includes identifying actions to help mitigate against the potential weaknesses that may result. It is similar in format to the team strengths exercise and the two exercises can be combined into one.
Team decision making processes	This web page describes a process for making decisions, based on the eight MTR-i team roles. The main advantage of using a process such as this is that makes team decision making much quicker and, particularly, it avoids 'going round in circles'. Teams often engage in circular arguments because they are arguing from a single perspective which prevents the discussion from moving forward (a bit like cowboys on horses lassoing a cow from different directions, until the cow can't move). But tackling all the different perspectives in turn, the discussion is 'unlocked' and the time is spent much more efficiently.
Improving personal contributions	This exercise helps individuals identify their primary contributions, and areas that are potential hindrances to creativity where they can benefit from further development.