Challenges in team building, and our services
Team Building at Evocatus is usually an activity on the way to meeting a wider challenge. In our experience, a demand to resolve challenges in team building is usually a result of a wider challenge which an organisation is trying to meet. These challenges could be about strategy development, communication or even about developing attitudes and leadership skills across the team. Everything we do is bespoke – we believe in the power of playing games and taking part in exercises, but we design our events to fit our client’s precise requirements, rather than rolling out the same activities. The team ends up being stronger, but team building is part of a wider process to help the organisation towards their goals. Finally, we believe in playing games because they are good fun; we work really hard to strike the right balance; stretching and challenging participants in a way that is fun and constructive.
Team building strategy games
As part of an organisation’s strategy development, we can run exercises which can allow every individual to engage with and contribute to the plan to deliver on the purpose and priorities of their team. This also provides an opportunity for leaders to fully understand the talent and experience on their team and how each individual responds to responsibility and pressure.
Team building communication games
Team building communication games are most useful when an organisation is operating in stovepipes and struggling to focus the team’s energies on to their strategic ends. This might be down to difficulties in explaining the strategy across the business or might be down to cultural resistance to change. Our most effective game to date was helping a huge global company build consent for an important change management programme. Senior managers had tried to explain the need for change with presentations, but it was only by experiencing the emotional engagement created in a communications wargame that the team recognised the problem faced across the business and the need for change.
Team problem solving games
All the best team building exercises have a directly relevant context which allow every team member to demonstrate their unique skills and talents. These sorts of exercises can be run across a wide area, along the lines of a detective story, with roleplayers and movie content providing parts of the narrative and the details which players will use to develop solutions to the challenge they face. Mechanics such as restricting managers to base location and restricting their communications causes them to rely on their team as agents and to concentrate on delegation and giving clear instructions. Designing a game to fit exactly with the skills and characters in the team under development takes work, but the value of developing individuals as part of the team is significant; diverse teams are only more effective in an inclusive culture, where different viewpoints are not just heard but valued.
Scenario based team building
Easier to keep in context, our scenario-based games use scenarios which could face the client’s team and, ideally, put individuals into different roles from those they usually hold. This could mean that the sales and marketing team become stakeholders or competitors, but could also mean that the finance team get to experience the challenges faced by logistics, HR or operations. These games not only build mutual understanding and strategic thinking across the team, but also allow for leaders to rehearse options for dealing with identified risks and opportunities.
The Evocatus bespoke team building service
Every team building event we run is bespoke, and the reason is diagnostic rather than commercial. Before we design anything, we work out what kind of team we are dealing with: how much its members genuinely rely on each other to do their work, how stable the membership is, how repetitive the task is, whether people are co-located or distributed, and how similar they are in background and outlook. A team whose members succeed by staying out of each other’s way needs something quite different from one that has to pass the baton under time pressure. Most disappointing team building is an intervention designed without that question having been asked.
We then look for the constraint. Research on team effectiveness converges on seven drivers: capability, communication, cognition, conditions, coordination, cooperation and coaching. For any given team, two or three of those are doing the damage and the rest are broadly fine. Evocatus co-authored the Ministry of Defence guide that translates this framework for Defence teams, so the diagnostic questions we ask are the ones the British military uses on itself. The design that follows targets the drivers that are actually binding, which is why our events look different from one client to the next even when the presenting problem sounds the same.
This is also why we are careful about what we promise. Trust, psychological safety and cohesion are the things clients most often ask for, and they are outputs rather than inputs. They emerge when a team coordinates well and sees that it did, and they cannot be installed directly by an afternoon of activities. What an exercise can do is give a team the experience that produces them, in a setting where the cost of friction is rehearsal rather than a live problem. Tuckman’s storming stage is not something we help teams skip; it is something we help them do safely and early. The After Action Review at the end is where that experience gets named and turned into something the team keeps.
In practice, most events we run are a blend of those described above; even in the most strategy-focussed games, there are benefits to be gained in the development of communication, trust and confidence and in those games with an emphasis on fostering inclusive, innovative teams there will often be some insight which supports strategy development.