Team Building Activities That Improve Communication & Build Trust
With a lot of team building options, the more you research them, the more suspicious you can become of the entire industry. What does a rope course, or escape room, or building bicycles have to do with better teams? Can these activities actually improve communication and trust?
Or is that just marketing language? It's a fair question.
And it is also a somewhat loaded question, because it implies (correctly) that a lot of team building activities dress themselves up in the language of communication and trust without constructing their experiences to properly develop either one.
A trivia night is fun. A cooking class is fun. A painting workshop where everyone makes the same sunset is... also fun (I think). But if fun is all they are, if someone hasn't carefully woven in moments of reflection and takeaways, why should a corporation invest in them?
Corporate event planners should be discerning when considering a team building activity. If you genuinely want to improve communication and build real trust, you must lift up the hood and inspect what is underneath. You can't just wander onto the car lot and buy the first thing you see with a shiny hood.
(Unless you are just looking for a fun experience and don't have any expectations beyond that. If that's you, picking up the first option you find may work just fine.)
Justin Bieber's Fisker Karma, an eye-catching if less than practical selection.
Improv-Based Team Building
Improving the communication of a group requires experience and a strategy.
When you book an improv team building workshop with The Radical Agreement Project (RA), you get an instructor who has spent at least a decade honing communication skills with thousands of comedians across hundreds of groups. And these groups don't have a casual interest in brushing up their communication skills. They have an urgent need to drastically improve them, or embarrassing shows (some might say debacles) will follow.
Think about what that means. An ensemble of comedians gets in front of a hundred people with no script and no clear plan. They have to decide what is entertaining and successfully communicate that to each other on the spot.
Time is short. Do-overs are impossible. The pressure of expectations is on.
The only hope these improvisers have rests entirely on their ability to communicate successfully from the first moment. For this reason, improvisers have spent decades developing exercises aimed at sharpening communication skills to a fine point. The best improvisers spend thousands of hours practicing these exercises, just as their instructors spend an equal amount of time coaching them through the very same games.
These are the instructors RA uses for our team building workshops.
They say practice makes perfect and our instructors are as close to perfect communication coaches as is humanly possible.
And do you know what our instructors have learned about communication over their years of practice?
That communication is a sink or swim game with players who all communicate differently. When I attempt to communicate something to someone else, I either succeed or fail with that person. I can never succeed on my own or fail on my own.
That means communicating ideas clearly, simply, and directly is hardly enough, because as soon as a second person is involved each person's communication weaknesses become the other person's weaknesses as well. Consider, if one person:
-
Listens to respond…
-
Can't read nonverbal cues…
-
Is vague…
-
Is extremely longwinded…
-
Always interrupts…
-
Suffers from status anxiety…
-
Pretends to understand when they don't…
Will that only affect the one of them?
No, if one person exhibits any of these qualities then it affects both communicators immediately. It's not enough to say, "Stan interrupts, if we can't communicate it is his fault," because the goal is to communicate, not to find a scapegoat.
Improv teaches you how to stop pointing fingers and start collaborating on communication; it teaches you to communicate with the other person the way they need you to, instead of the way you want to. And it teaches you to always be in the moment and flexible, so that you can quickly adjust how you are communicating to meet any of these challenges.
Imagine a team of smart people, all striving to bend to each other's communication idiosyncrasies. Is it any wonder experienced improvisers can pull off performances that make audiences wonder if they are psychic or if the whole thing had been scripted?
Wouldn't you want others to wonder the same thing about your team?
Building true trust among teammates is a very similar story. People think of it as something that builds naturally over time, which is true to a point. But improvisers know the mechanism is specific.
Trust doesn't accumulate because you've been in the same Slack channel for three years. It accumulates from tiny, brief moments compiled into the aggregate. A suggestion is embraced, a concern is affirmed, an effort noticed, a need anticipated…
String enough of those moments together and you have a team that trusts each other. Break that trust even once and get ready for the whole thing to come tumbling down (read why here).
Just as communication is vital for live improv, so too is trust between performers. Creating entertainment without a plan with teammates looking to undercut each other will not work. Consequently improvisers have also developed a large number of exercises designed to nurture and safeguard trust.
Perhaps more importantly, improvisers have also adopted an attitude to help them navigate this treacherous path, an attitude that is best summed up by an adage coined by Del Close, one of improv's seminal figures: Treat Your Teammates Like Poets and Geniuses. This simple missive unlocks fiercely loyal teams capable of spectacular performances and it can yield similar results in your office. Read more about its applications here.
Improv is uniquely positioned to improve communication and build trust because those two challenges are central to the entire art form. That's true for improv but not true for most team building offerings.
You could do a different corporate activity every day for a month without repeating yourself. Cocktail making, dance classes, axe throwing (because apparently that has something to do with teams), blindfolded hot sauce tasting, sheep herding (you read that right), trapeze classes, goat herding, lip sync battles and of course, competitive rubber duck racing. All available for a fee, all promising to deliver results, but none of them built for it as improv is.
I am not here to tell you those things are bad. They're not bad! They are fun and fun has real value. A team that has laughed together feels a little more human to each other. I believe that genuinely.
But here's the uncomfortable truth about most of them. They're organized around a task.
Mix the cocktail. Escape the room. Don't throw the axe into a coworker.
The task is the point, and what happens between the people doing it is just background noise. You can crush an escape room while one person figures everything out and everyone else follows instructions. You can take a beautiful pasta-making class in near total silence.
The activity doesn't ask anyone to actually practice communicating. It asks them to complete something. And if they complete it, they "win," regardless of how they treated each other along the way.
The activities that work are the ones where you can't win that way. Where the interaction between people isn't a byproduct of the experience, it is the experience. Everything else, any task or premise or game mechanic, only exists to force that interaction. That's the whole design principle. And once you see it, you'll notice pretty quickly how many team building options don't meet that bar.
Activities That Actually Work
There are a few types of activities that I think genuinely hold up here. I'll start with the one I know best and then be honest about a few others.
Improv Workshops
Full disclosure, in case it isn't already obvious, I run these. I've been arranging, planning and running improv-based team building workshops going back for almost twenty years now. I started in 2009 at the UCB Theatre, and I am the opposite of a neutral party. You know that now. Hire me, don't hire me, but at least know who's talking.
We've already covered why they are so powerful in the team building space, so let's look at some other effective options.
Storytelling Workshops
A good storytelling workshop, and I want to emphasize good, can build real communication skills and real trust. Talented facilitators can get people telling true, personal stories in a structured setting. Not "share something fun about yourself," but actual stories with stakes.
Something shifts in the room when your colleague tells you something real about themselves. They've gone out on a limb, the group has caught them, and now everyone knows a little more about what's actually going on inside this person they sit next to every day. That's trust.
The act of building and delivering the story is communication practice. Both things happen at once. For city-specific recommendations, see below.
Structured Dialogue Sessions
Less glamorous than the other two, I know. But a skilled facilitator running a genuine structured dialogue session (not a meeting with a better agenda, an actual dialogue session with real protocols) is sometimes exactly the right tool. There are facilitators who specialize in this, usually with backgrounds in conflict resolution or organizational psychology, and for teams where communication has genuinely broken down, where there is real tension between subgroups (maybe something went sideways and hasn't been addressed), this is the call.
Not every communication problem is a "let's go have some fun together" problem. Some of them need a room and a skilled facilitator and an honest conversation. City-specific recommendations below.
What to Look For in Any Activity
Maybe none of the above is right for your team. That's fine. But here's the test I'd run on any activity that claims to improve communication and trust.
Can you get through it without actually listening to anyone? Be honest. If one person can drive and everyone else can coast, that's your answer. If the activity structurally requires people to track each other, respond to each other, build on what each other does, then you're in the right territory.
Also, can you fail safely?
This one matters more than people think. Trust gets built in moments of risk, and people only take risks when they believe the landing will be okay. Activities that create low-stakes moments of genuine vulnerability, where it's fine to look a little ridiculous, create the conditions for trust to develop fast. Activities where everyone just has to perform competently don't.
If both answers point in the right direction, you've probably found something worth doing. If not, you've found something worth enjoying, which is not worthless, but it's not what you came looking for.
Find the Right Activity In Your City
The specific vendors, venues, and dynamics vary a lot depending on where your team is. I've put together city guides for the markets I work in most, with local recommendations, honest notes on what I've seen work, and improv workshop availability.