Training Team Building
Where training becomes experience
What it looks like
A minute of outdoor training: outside, with something to take home.
Training is the family of formats that are training in the strict sense. The activity itself can look like any other: what makes the difference is what comes before it and what comes after. In the Gulf a team usually spans several cultures, functions and offices at once, and social bonding on its own rarely produces the shared understanding, the trust and the accountability that turn into results. These formats go after exactly that, with experienced facilitators, tailored exercises and a structured debrief. We run them across the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
In a Training format the client states an objective for change: by the end of the day the group has to come out different from the way it went in, along one specific dimension. Improving the way decisions get made. Reducing the friction between two departments. Bringing out who can take a leading role. The activity then gets chosen and designed *for* that objective, and never the other way round. The day after, the debrief is what carries the day into the daily work, which is the whole reason for running it this way.
How a Training day is built
1. Briefing with the client. First we work out what has to change and why. It’s the stage where we sometimes discover that the stated problem isn’t the real problem, and it’s time well spent.
2. Briefing with the participants. The group knows it’s doing training. It isn’t a surprise and it isn’t a game in disguise: being straight about the objective is what makes the debrief possible.
3. The activity. Here what has to happen happens. We observe, we don’t intervene.
4. Debrief. The least spectacular part and the most important: what surfaced during the activity gets carried back to the daily work. Without that step a team building stays a good memory.
When it makes sense to choose it
It works well if
- you have a training objective you can state, not just a wish to do something together
- there’s an internal sponsor, in HR, in the leadership or at the head of a department, willing to do the opening briefing properly
- the group is stable and will keep working together: a debrief only makes sense if there’s an afterwards
- you’re willing to give time to the debrief instead of closing with drinks
It works less well if
- the occasion is a celebration or entertainment, which is a legitimate choice, and then another family suits it better
- the group is made up of different people every time
- there’s no time for the preparation phase: a Training designed in three days is an Action format with a more serious name
The formats
Outdoor Team Building
Classic experiential training in the open air: exercises on getting to know each other, on relationships and on problem solving.
Experiential Training
A day built backwards: the objective first, the exercises after. No theme, no costumes.
Corporate Theatre
Staging real workplace situations to see them from outside. The most effective format there is on climate and communication.
When what surfaces deserves an afterwards
An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.
Discover Team Coaching →
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae
Some of these formats run where the conditions don’t help: the heat, the open desert, the distances. What changes when people are uncomfortable, and what has to be checked before proposing it to a group, we’ve written about separately: when the conditions aren’t comfortable.