Team Building

The leader’s role is to be a facilitator. We bring our role as a facilitator to the classroom so that they understand the process of facilitating and leading among themselves.

Facilitation comes from the French word facile, meaning “easy.” Your role as a facilitator is to make the learning process easier for your participants.

The following are some thoughts on what makes a good leader:

• Although you challenge people; your primary goal is to help people grow in a supportive environment—help them “win.”
• Everything you do should lead to an enhanced sense of self-respect and team respect; if a “mistake” or difficulty occurs, your job is to frame it as an opportunity to learn and improve.

2 – 4 weeks

Many learning models describe how individuals learn through experience. Most have four distinct phases: experience, reflection, processing, applying. The Experiential Learning Cycle describes the various stages that a group or an individual goes through after an experience.

Participants internalize the experiences that they had and begin to see the larger meaning of these experiences.

Processing can occur on an individual basis or as a part of a larger group. Often in a teambuilding program, processing is part of a debriefing activity. Processing helps find the meaning of the activity.

The application of new knowledge is a key piece to this learning model. The learnings from the experience have been distilled through reflection and processing. The participants begin to think about how they will apply what they have just learned to future experiences in their lives.

2 – 4 weeks

A “Full Value Contract” (FVC) is a set of values, norms, or ground rules that the group establishes and agrees to use for their time together. The essential points of the Full Value Contract are: to allow each member of the group to have a voice in creating group norms, to empower participants by allowing them to create the Full Value Contract, and to ensure that these values will allow the group to work toward their common goals. The Full Value Contract asks participants to:

• fully value themselves,
• fully value the other members of the group, and
• fully value the environment—this includes the physical environment and the group environment. Another way to look at a Full Value Contract is to simply ask your participants to:
• play hard,
• play safe,
• play fair.

2 – 4 weeks