Stepcase Lifehack: "“As we go around the circle, tell the group your name and something special about you.”
That kind of team builder may have been useful on the first day of kindergarten, but when you’re building a business team or putting together a team for another important project, you need to go far beyond silly icebreakers to create a cohesive group."
3 comments:
One of the most painful parts of orientation this past fall was the endless string of "ice breakers" we had to partake in. While they may seem like the best option, they aren't! I fully agree with the author that the best way to get a group to work well together is to jump right into the problem at hand. If you do your prep work right and inform everyone of what everyone else's job is, then there should be little issue with this approach. It puts everyone at ease (particularly if you start with a problem that is easy to solve) and gets them working in a field/realm of ideas that they are all familiar with.
Although it seems simple, I never thought about that first project idea where a project is assigned for the purpose of the team getting to know how each one works better. I definitely see how establishing a hierarchy right off the bat is helpful because if not then there will always be too many cooks.
I agree with Chris that orientation was terrible I hate ice breaker games. I feel that people work better when they can just gradually and naturally introduce themselves to each other. I found that orientation also caused divides in the ptm/design class because certain people had spent a whole week meeting a few people in our class but not the rest - i still wish we have just jumped into classes right away.
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