Team Building Through Forced Adversity - Your Challenge Awaits! By Lance Winslow
By Lance Winslow
One of the best ways to build your team strong and stronger than you could ever imagine is through forced adversity. What do I mean by forced adversity? Well, if you meet strong groups, teams or organizations with a tight bond, you will find they have shared at one or more times adversity that they conquered together. So, does this mean that you need to put your team through a life threatening event to get them to bond together? Well, if you did, that would certainly do the trick.
Personally, I find many groups quite weak and the participants unworthy of the group, however, I also realize there is power in numbers and you legally cannot go around putting people through life threatening events to maximize performance, efficiency and team work. However, you can use simulated and forced adversity to build the team and the character of the individuals and in doing so you will find the natural leaders in the group as well.
In a military boot camp they put the team through hell and adversity and the group bonds together, exactly what they need to fight as a unit when the real battle begins. Perhaps this is why corporate adventure excursions are so popular, where they make the team work together in order to survive and overcome adversity. There are now companies that offer adventure retreats for executives to help build their teams. The leadership or adventure Challenges are amazing and yield incredible results in renewed organizational capital.
These sorts of natural team building events do simulate a reality of how humans bond with each other in a common cause. We also see this in sports when a team battles it out in a championship competition, this is a time when strong bonds are built and strong teams are formed, please consider all this philosophy when planning your team building efforts in the future.
By Lance Winslow
One of the best ways to build your team strong and stronger than you could ever imagine is through forced adversity. What do I mean by forced adversity? Well, if you meet strong groups, teams or organizations with a tight bond, you will find they have shared at one or more times adversity that they conquered together. So, does this mean that you need to put your team through a life threatening event to get them to bond together? Well, if you did, that would certainly do the trick.
Personally, I find many groups quite weak and the participants unworthy of the group, however, I also realize there is power in numbers and you legally cannot go around putting people through life threatening events to maximize performance, efficiency and team work. However, you can use simulated and forced adversity to build the team and the character of the individuals and in doing so you will find the natural leaders in the group as well.
In a military boot camp they put the team through hell and adversity and the group bonds together, exactly what they need to fight as a unit when the real battle begins. Perhaps this is why corporate adventure excursions are so popular, where they make the team work together in order to survive and overcome adversity. There are now companies that offer adventure retreats for executives to help build their teams. The leadership or adventure Challenges are amazing and yield incredible results in renewed organizational capital.
These sorts of natural team building events do simulate a reality of how humans bond with each other in a common cause. We also see this in sports when a team battles it out in a championship competition, this is a time when strong bonds are built and strong teams are formed, please consider all this philosophy when planning your team building efforts in the future.
By Lance Winslow
Comment
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Comment by michaelcardus on January 28, 2009 at 2:07pm -
Lance,
nice insight, another example of this "forced bonding" is the team dynamics seen in an emergency room. While a patient needs immediate care, politics and feeling are pushed aside for the immediate goal of keeping a person from dying. All the team members are specially trained and know their roles, although they also now when to speak up and not.
We find that organizations that are in crisis (appropiate at the moment) tend to pull together.
What many of the practioners do, on this site, is juse that. Place groups into an emergency simulation and have them rally around a common cause.
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