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Team
Building for an International Law Firm
"Before
we knew it we had learned more about each other, considered how
to work more effectively together and had a lot of fun"
In September
2001 Fresh Tracks worked
with an international law firm who were keen to conclude a team
away day with some high impact team-building exercises that would
be creative, unusual and fun. We agreed to provide an afternoon's
programme of team tasks that would challenge this demanding and
hard-working group and encourage them to think about their individual
and joint contributions to the team.
Background Information
The company is a major international law firm with its principal
office in the City of London and a worldwide network of offices.
Aims and Objectives
The firm's Commercial Litigation team had planned a two-day meeting
to examine practice and client needs. They wanted to complement
this internal analysis with a learning session that would be somewhat
more light-hearted, and would ensure the conference ended on a high
note, sending the team away positive and energised.
The busy Commercial
Litigation team don't often have time to take stock of their role
as team members. Our main objective was to therefore enable the
team to work together more effectively.
Programme
Development
The programme was developed with liaison with the firm's Head of
Training, who let us know, in no uncertain terms that the programme
needed to be tightly focused, in depth and busy, adding that lawyers
"tend to eat up tasks - they get bored so quickly!". We
were briefed on the role, age range, areas of expertise and seniority
of the participants. Taking all this into account, we began to draft
a programme to ensure that the firm's objectives would be met and
that the afternoon would give the group some tangible bottom line
results in team development.
The programme
was designed to take into account individual specialisms and aimed
to get individuals to work with colleagues outside their area of
expertise or level of seniority. We were happy to revise the programme
to ensure that we were working within the limits of the team's comfort
zones, whilst challenging their expectations.
Delivery
On the day, the programme was delivered by one of Fresh
Tracks' most experienced facilitators with considerable experience
of dealing with senior team members.
Knowing that
this group was very time-conscious, it was important that the first
session justified this time-out for the team and underlined the
value of the afternoon's activities. By referring the planned activities
back to particular areas of specialism, we ensured that the programme
could be placed firmly within a familiar context to enable clear
parallels to be drawn between working life and the challenges they
were about to face. In particular the aim in this first session
was to start to find out about the people behind the job roles and
to discover the characteristics and qualities that people don't
usually get an opportunity to display in the workplace.
We began with
"Amazing Secrets" in which each participant writes on
a Post It something about themselves that no one else in the room
knows - they used to play in a band, have appeared on TV, saved
a life etc. In their teams each group then tries to match the secret
to the individual. This activity reinforces the theme of sharing
and discovery outlined in the introduction.
The next session,
"Silent Circle", focused on communication and required
the group to form a circle based on the date of their birthday,
without uttering a word. In their new teams, the group moved on
to a creative challenge, "Egg Drop", in which the teams
needed to build a structure that would prevent their egg from breaking
when dropped from a height of 10 feet.
Next came "Saboteur"
which looks at trust and blame: teams had to copy a detailed plan
view of a maze from their combined memory, a difficult task in itself
made even more challenging by the fact that there may be a saboteur
in the team. In order to prevent the saboteur from destroying their
plan the team can vote him/her out or ask him/her back in if they
feel that the accused is in fact innocent. This opens discussions
on trust and how it feels to be accused of letting the team down.
The final activity
got the whole team working together: "Group Juggling"
begins with smaller groups and just one bean bag per person, building
to a point where the whole team forms a circle, simultaneously juggling
two bean bags each. Co-ordination, support and pin-sharp timing
are required to succeed at this challenge. It may take a little
while but when it goes right the feelings of elation and achievement
are unforgettable.
Feedback
By the end of the afternoon, the group had relaxed, were having
fun and it was apparent that some of the barriers had begun to come
down. Our client felt that "Fresh
Tracks skillfully put us through our paces on the team tasks
and before we knew it we had learned more about each other, considered
how to work more effectively together and had a lot of fun."
And although we can't claim to have addressed all of this group's
issues in one afternoon, the general feeling was that "the
afternoon of team tasks encouraged team members to get to know each
other better, to work more effectively together and provided a fun
and energising end to two days of hard work."
©Fresh
Tracks 2001, for more information
click here or email: mail@freshtracks.co.uk
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