Pfeiffer's Classic Activities for Building Better Teams

Research has shown that there is no better way to foster team spirit and promote harmony than to engage team members in experiential learning activities that impart lessons or encourage insight through direct experience or practice, as opposed to listening to a lecture or watching a demonstration. This collection of specially selected experiential learning activities represent the very best team activities drawn from Pfeiffer's Annuals and Handbooks over the past thirty years. Never before published in one volume, these classic activities- personally selected by e-learning magazine executive editor Jack Gordon- are those that have stood the test of time. Gordon presents forty engaging, excellently conceived and designed team-building exercises that help to build trust, improve communication, understand roles, and improve performance among team members. These are the exercises experienced trainers remember with the most fondness, and the ones up-and-coming trainers need to have in their toolkit. They can be used to address a wide range of topics and problems with both newly formed or long-standing work teams. The exercises are divided into two types. Those in Part I engage learners in contrived or imaginary experiences designed to take a group "out of itself" and look more dispassionately at a problem. The exercises in Part II draw their content entirely from the real issues confronting the team. Each experiential learning activity is designed as a complete, ready-to-use training design listing goals, group sizes, and time requirements. Also included are clear and complete instructions for facilitators and participants, reproducible handouts, and questions for discussion. The authors of each activity also suggest some variations to accommodate different goals and needs so that the exercises can be adapted to fit different requirements.Gordon, Jack is the author of 'Pfeiffer's Classic Activities for Building Better Teams' with ISBN 9780787967093 and ISBN 0787967092.