by Jason Treu | Feb 28, 2018
I’ve been doing intensive research for more than two years on maximizing team performance, collaboration, and innovation. Along the way, I’ve interviewed experts, influencers, HR/Sales executives, CEOs and many others on the very best team building exercises.
I’ve tested dozens of them out in every size organization from Fortune 100, SMBs, startups, very small businesses, remote teams, executive teams, executive boards, charity boards, sales teams, human resources, etc.
I’m giving you the best of the best below. These will make an impact in your organization. They will increase performance, KPIs, collaboration, retention, engagement, innovation/creativity and much more.
I don’t go into the science, research, and reasoning in this post just the exercises themselves.
And you could schedule them quarterly to do and you’ll have enough for the next 15 months.
Here are the Top 5 Team Building Activities to Sky Rocket Performance
1) Have every person bring a picture at the beginning of a weekly meeting. Give people 30 seconds to say why they picked the picture and what it means to them. You’ll see engagement and productivity rise immediately in the meeting.
There are several reasons why using picture is powerful:
- Pictures evoke strong emotions in people and create instant connections. They create an instant boost of serotonin and oxytocin, which are connection-building hormones. Plus, that’s why Facebook and Instagram work – pictures!
- They capture people’s attention (and there is less chance they get distracted versus just telling a story alone). We remember images much better than words. Research shows that people remember 60% of they see three days later. It is only 10% of words.
- They evoke associations in people’s minds to things they have done, experienced or just heard about
- Human beings are hardwired for visual stimulation. We’ve only had written communication for 3000+ years, and visual communication for 10x longer.
- Photos work across all cultures and geographic boundaries. Words don’t. I’ve clients run this in Europe, Asia, and South America, and it’s been just as effective. It would be much harder to do this with words along because of language barriers and differences in languages.
1A) You can also do that by having people bring in three pictures: One of themselves as a kid, one of them with friends/family and one of them doing an activity they love. Here is a free website with royalty-free pictures that people could use as well.
2) Go around the room and answer one question in one minute. The leader needs to go first and they need to share something vulnerable. You can use my team building game, Cards Against Mundanity, to get the questions from. It’s based off a famous research study by Professor Arthur Aron where he got complete strangers to create the closest relationships in their lives in 45 minutes.
2A) Get a bowl and put it in a central location such as the kitchen. Put questions in the bowl. People can use them to ask people questions.
3) Have everyone go around the room and share the one-minute in his or her life they would relive over every other moment. Each person has one minute to share what that moment was and why it matters to them. It brings out the most important moments for people and has them sharing it with the team.
4) Everyone wants a fun exercise, so here is one for you: Airband or Hairband activity. You get team members to act out and “lip sync” their favorite song. Give them a week to prepare, and then have them perform it. Get creative with costumes, props, etc. At the end, have them share why they picked that song. Was it because of a specific experience or memory?
5) Memory wall exercise. People draw pictures or share photos of a meaningful and positive time/experience they have had at work. This activity gets people to share positive memories about the organization, and focus on the things that are going right.
Want a (free) team building activity that is proven, tested and will immediately increase performance, collaboration and problem-solving? Download “Cards Against Mundanity.” I’ve included two cards from the game below.
I’ve spent two years researching and testing this game in dozens of organizations from small businesses to the largest corporations to come up with an easy, quick and fun activity that gets people immediately operating at peak performance. You can watch my TEDx speech to learn more.
by Jason Treu | Feb 27, 2018
Are you looking to increase productivity, crush your organizational goals and maximize revenue/profit? Do you want increase creative ideas and/or problem-solving? Gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace?
If you answered, “yes” to any of the above, read on.
I’m going to share with you how to do it along with the deep psychological and emotional reasons(and research) behind why it will work for you.
It’s also fun, quick and easy and it will make a major impact on your team’s performance – up to 7x increase (according to research studies). You’ll be able to get people to be operating at peak performance on a consistent basis.
Imagine how much more you will be able to accomplish in the next year if you can do that?! Imagine what that will do for your career and/or business?!
Here is the first critical concept to understand: Increasing engagement and maximizing outcomes are directly linked to how much people trust others within the group and trust you, the leader.
And that’s completely broken today for most leaders.
Many teams/organizations are run by leaders who are very poor managers. This leads to disengagement and subpar performance/productivity.
Here are a few data points on why this happening:
- Research studies show that 90%+ of employee work satisfaction/engagement is based on trust. 70% of US workers are dissatisfied, which highlights a major trust deficit.
- 45% of people today don’t trust their leaders, and that’s having a major impact on the team and organizational success.
- “The overwhelming majority—a shocking 80%—of employees surveyed think they could do their job without managers and deem them unnecessary.”
- “71% of managers say they know how to motivate their team, but only 44% of employees agree that their manager knows how to motivate them.”
- Gallup’s, “State of the American Manager, managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores.
- Most managers aren’t getting any training or the training they are getting isn’t working.
With any major challenge lies a huge opportunity. The teams and organizations that can figure out how to boost trust are going to gain a major competitive advantage.
The ones who can build a high-level of trust will:
- Get significantly more done because participation will increase.
- Come up with many more suggestions for improvement and innovation.
- Come much more prepared for meetings and won’t be looking at their email or thinking about what they have to do for the rest of the day.
- Look to contribute much more than they criticize others.
- Be much more open to change and new ideas.
- Help others proactively and be invested in their success.
- Will work smarter, harder and longer leading to productivity and bottom line gains.
Don’t you think that creating an environment like this will make you a more effective leader and help everyone as well?
There is a very specific reason why this works, and this is the “secret sauce.”
The most important component of trust is caring. The more you get people to care about the people in the group and get them invested in the success of other people, you’ll see performance immediately increase. (Check out the research of Charles Feltman to learn more about this)
“CARING is the assessment that you have the other person’s interests in mind as well as your own when you make decisions and take actions. Of the four assessments of trustworthiness, care is in some ways the most important for building lasting trust. When people believe you are only concerned with your self-interest and don’t consider their interests as well, they may trust your sincerity, reliability, and competence, but they will tend to limit their trust of you to specific situations or transactions. On the other hand, when people believe you hold their interest in mind, they will extend their trust more broadly to you.”
Then the question comes up, “so how do I get people to care about the team and team’s success?”
1) Belonging is in every human beings DNA. They want to be apart of groups that are meaningful for them and ones in which they feel close to the people.
2) Research confirms that disconnection from people will kill you. It’s as essential as food, water, shelter and a basic human need. Loneliness is the equivalency of smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
- (Check out the incredible research by Professor John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago that backs this up. “Cacioppo discusses how the need for social connection is so fundamental in humans that without it we fall apart, down to the cellular level. Over time blood pressure climbs and gene expression falters. Cognition dulls; immune systems deteriorate. Aging accelerates under the constant, corrosive presence of stress hormones. Loneliness, Cacioppo argued, isn’t some personality defect or sign of weakness—it’s a survival impulse like hunger or thirst.”)
Creating belonging is the team is absolutely essential.
If you apply the same logic to how you would build any relationship outside of work, you will be able to do this quite quickly.
The more people know about you, the more emotionally invested they get in you.You do that through sharing, listening and asking questions.
When you share with others you become more vulnerable. When you become more vulnerable, you become more invested in others and vice-versa.
And when the leader in a group becomes vulnerable it tells other people it is safe to share. That’s why I always recommend the leader needs to start sharing first for this to work.
This opens the floodgates “of sharing” to create psychological safety in the team/organization (i.e. the #1 factor in maximum team performance according to a three-year study by Google).
The reason that psychological safety can be created really quickly is that people can relate not only to the shared experiences but the shared emotions.
For example, if you describe a loss in your life, other people in the room have had some form of loss in their lives. It may not be the same loss (i.e. your mom passing away). But they can relate to your story through shared emotions (pain, hurt, sadness, etc.).
And if you do activities that can quickly get people to open and share, you are fast-tracking the relationship building process. What could take years or decades, you can do in a very short period of time.
So how does this all make a team or organization more effective?
You treat the people closest in your lives much differently than the people you either have neutral feelings for or dislike.
Think about the people you work with that you like versus ones you dislike or have neutral feelings about. How do you engage with them? Do you care equally about their success? Are you more willing to people you like or people you dislike?
If you can create a team and/organization with people that like each other (which doesn’t mean they are friends), you will radically increase performance.
Below are suggested activities you can use. They have worked very well for every size client from very small businesses to Fortune 100 companies.
1) Have every person bring a picture at the beginning of a weekly meeting. Give people 30 seconds to say why they picked the picture and what it means to them. You’ll see engagement and productivity rise immediately in the meeting.
There are several reasons why using picture is powerful:
- Pictures evoke strong emotions in people and create instant connections. They create an instant boost of serotonin and oxytocin, which are connection-building hormones. Plus, that’s why Facebook and Instagram work – pictures!
- They capture people’s attention (and there is less chance they get distracted versus just telling a story alone). We remember images much better than words. Research shows that people remember 60% of they see three days later. It is only 10% of words.
- They evoke associations in people’s minds to things they have done, experienced or just heard about
- Human beings are hardwired for visual stimulation. We’ve only had written communication for 3000+ years, and visual communication for 10x longer.
- Photos work across all cultures and geographic boundaries. Words don’t. I’ve clients run this in Europe, Asia, and South America, and it’s been just as effective. It would be much harder to do this with words along because of language barriers and differences in languages.
1A) You can also do that by having people bring in three pictures: One of themselves as a kid, one of them with friends/family and one of them doing an activity they love. Here is a free website with royalty-free pictures that people could use as well.
2) Go around the room and answer one question in one minute. The leader needs to go first and they need to share something vulnerable. You can use my team building game, Cards Against Mundanity, to get the questions from. It’s based off a famous research study by Professor Arthur Aron where he got complete strangers to create the closest relationships in their lives in 45 minutes.
2A) Get a bowl and put it in a central location such as the kitchen. Put questions in the bowl. People can use them to ask people questions.
3) Have everyone go around the room and share the one-minute in his or her life they would relive over every other moment. Each person has one minute to share what that moment was and why it matters to them. It brings out the most important moments for people and has them sharing it with the team.
4) Everyone wants a fun exercise, so here is one for you: Airband or Hairband activity. You get team members to act out and “lip sync” their favorite song. Give them a week to prepare, and then have them perform it. Get creative with costumes, props, etc. At the end, have them share why they picked that song. Was it because of a specific experience or memory?
5) Memory wall exercise. People draw pictures or share photos of a meaningful and positive time/experience they have had at work. This activity gets people to share positive memories about the organization, and focus on the things that are going right.
Want a (free) team building activity that is proven, tested and will immediately increase performance, collaboration and problem-solving? Download “Cards Against Mundanity.” I’ve included two cards from the game below.
I’ve spent two years researching and testing this game in dozens of organizations from small businesses to the largest corporations to come up with an easy, quick and fun activity that gets people immediately operating at peak performance. You can watch my TEDx speech to learn more.
by Jason Treu | Feb 21, 2018
Tip: motivating people is about getting them to think less about themselves and more about the group. They then get more engaged and focused on other people’s success. It rubs off on the group and then everyone is doing it.
(more…)
by Jason Treu | Feb 21, 2018
Listen to me on Brad Owen’s Podcast, HR Coaching, to learn how to build a high performing workplace.
Here is what we cover in the podcast…
1:22- Welcome Jason Treu!
1:38- What comes to mind when you think about corporate culture?
2:32- What do you feel like most businesses are missing when it comes to corporate culture these days?
4:40- What can businesses do to incorporate a healthy company culture?
6:52- For small businesses when they can develop these roles they can move up into, what are flat businesses doing to show that there is a path for growth and promotion?
*Culture is what attracts people to your business, but caring is what retains them!
12:23- What is the game you designed and what did you design it for?
17:35- What do you think it is about bringing people together that has an impact on these shared experiences?
21:20- What is the break-even of the gameplay within each team?
*An employee will be 7x more productive if an employee feels that they have a great friend at work.
25:49- What are some ways businesses have made mistakes in the hiring process and what did it mean to them?
28:30- What do you see long-term for businesses who do not take hiring seriously?
30:34- If you could take away one piece of wisdom from you, what would you have them remember?
#jasontreuexecutivecoach #jasontreubooks #jasontreudallas #jasontreuentrepreneur #jasontreulinkedin #jasontreupodcast #jasontreutwitter #jasontreutumblr #jasontreucoachingprogram #jasontreubusinesscoach #jasontreubusinesscoaching #jasontreuyoutube
by Jason Treu | Feb 21, 2018
Check out my podcast on how to transform your workplace on In The Clear Podcast.
Welcome to the In the Clear Podcast. My name is Justin Recla and I am your host today. And today we are going to be talking about the workplace. This is something, I think at some point and time whether you’re an entrepreneur or you’re an employee, that we all have dealt with and we continue to deal with on a daily basis and it’s something, from a transparent perspective, is super, super important to the success of any business. And today we actually have Jason Treu, who is an executive coach, who’s been doing this for the last seven or eight years and he helps businesses establish a transparent work culture within their business. Jason, thanks for joining us on the show today.
Hey, thanks for having on the show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.
Thank you so much. Well Jason, talk to me a little bit more about exactly what it is that you do as an executive coach.
Well, people come to me for external issues, meaning that they’ll have leadership challenge in an organization, they may have problems managing people, they many have some conflicts, poor communication. You know, culture that’s not on track or they’re second set of people that come to me that want to start a business. That have been successful and now have reached a point where they want to do something else. And underpinning it all usually is people are in some sort of career crisis. They don’t know what to do next and if they’re really following their purpose and so typically, they’re having some other challenges.
But the real problem, or 75% of it at least, is an internal problem. So part of what I do initially with people is more mini therapy, deep self inquiry, whatever you want to call it, to really look at what people are doing because that solves most of the problem. And if you just deal with external challenges, it’s like putting a band-aid on a broken arm. I mean, sure it’s going to help to some degree but it’s only incremental. You get exponential increases when you start looking at the inside and looking at all the patterns that aren’t serving you and the blind spots that are you holding you back because that’s where you get the most lift and get to the next level the quickest.
Absolutely agree. So give me an example of a company, by all means, you don’t need to name names. But give me an example of a company that you saw a problem like this and what was the solution.
Well, I mean I have a one client who is a very large company and they hand a chairman who was a founder, who still came into the business every day, and they had a CEO. Well, CEO really wasn’t the CEO because the chairman was their every day and he would acquiesce and talk to him and get decisions made. Well, that really made for poor organizational structure. But the challenge is, it’s not that the chairman wanted to go to work every day, it’s that he didn’t there was anything else for him to do. He felt like his life was over at that point, right? I mean, not in the sense where there’s nothing left, but there are little things to do.
So the only way to get out of that was a career issues, right? Like, what am I going to do and so I helped him see the fact that there were a lot of opportunities out there to be more of an active investor, so he didn’t have to go into a day to day and do the work. That there was exciting things that he could do and make a lot of money at it and meet a lot of great people that he would have never met before. Well, what happened then was he stopped coming into the office and the CEO became the CEO and then I had to help him through a whole other set of issues, but then the whole organization just lifted up and there was massive lift in the company and massive growth and they’ve done some incredible things since then. But that’s a problem where you have people that aren’t able to see beyond the four walls of the organization and they’re holding everyone back in the company and it usually starts at the top.
Yeah and that leadership aspect, you’re so spot on because it does bleed down into, you know, from the top down. It does bleed down into the employees and so forth in. It does have an effect on the company business as whole. And over time, if it’s not addressed, it ultimately builds up resentment in the workforce and starts affecting productivity in the employees. And more importantly, you start losing folks. They start going other places.
Right. And the issue comes is that when people have to deal with … when you’re dealing this situation, it was people that don’t have a lot is confident. Their past patterns or a lot of other stucks that come up that were the issue. And it’s also the issue of your CEO and you’re not been the CEO really, there’s confidence issues, there’s doing a lot of other things but then also have to be worked on. They’re not external things, they’re internal issues and that’s the thing that you have to deal with when working with people at that level. To get them results and behavioral changes fast, otherwise it’s either slow or the change is just really minor and it’s not something that they can leverage over time. They don’t learn new things and they can’t really get clarity on what’s going around them. They’ll just fix the immediate problem and that’s kind of if, just like I said before, like putting a band-aid on it when they really need to set their arm because it’s broke.
Yeah. I absolutely love this conversation. It’s something that Tony and I have both experienced and we’ve seen in our two businesses that we run and of course, and our eight year old who’s on who sixth business. And we have a saying that if you really, really want to grow yourself, become an entrepreneur and the challenges that you have to face on the internal struggle, the personal growth and so forth is huge. That doesn’t always translate over into business because of, you know, it’s job. It’s something that you do on an everyday basis and so I love the fact that you’re bringing the conversation to corporate sector, that, hey look, the internal struggles that you’re dealing with, like you said, it’s a broken arm. It’s not a band-aid situation here. Let’s address that. And so you’re bringing that gross stuff to corporate America and I absolutely love that.
Yeah, because the emotional … An example is that if you are emotionally detached as an individual because growing up you grow up with parents that were very standoffish and they weren’t very emotional with you and didn’t do a lot of stuff. What happens is, and the people that you manage or that are around you, don’t get that either, and then they feel like you’re not engaged and you don’t care and all that stuff causes problems. Well that’s an internal issue that you have to overcome and that you have to then lead with vulnerability. Unless you learn that and someone helps you, your ability to be successful with really be challenged and at some point you hit a ceiling. And that ceiling at some point, you’ll eventually hit a valley because that’s just where people go so I think people need to really realize that their biggest challenge going forth is their own blind spot. It’s not performance.
I think companies, that they only weigh too much on performance grading and not taking look at emotional intelligence, soft skills and everything else because those are the things, when you look at the research and data, separate out extraordinary people from people that are just very good.
Absolutely and I love the fact that you bring that up because it’s one of the things we see changing in business world, is that the companies that get that, the companies that understand that, feed that and make sure their employees have that need met and the results are absolutely amazing. And you see it across the board, where you get companies that you don’t a title, you can make up your title. Just little things that feed that emotional intelligence that affirms that aspect of humanity that’s, for so long been, removed from corporate America. So I love the fact that you’re actually talking about this with businesses out there because it’s huge. It’s really a game changer from the sense that when we get back to that connective-ness and diving into who we are and what makes us up, that it’s changes the entire face of business.
Yeah, because now they’re doing research and they’re showing that connection with other people is as critical as food, water, shelter, whatever the basic needs are. They’ve linked that connection, the literally, the connection of connectivity with other people to that level. So you need to build that in your organization and when you really take a look at what makes companies like Google like a number one work place, it’s that. People tend to look at the perks and everything else because that’s what people highlight because it seems sexy, but that’s really not what’s it. It’s that the engineers can spend 25% of their time working on stuff outside their own job and it’s okay. So then, they can actually be creative and they can harvest their creativity instead of having to stifle it and just do a job because they have to do it.
And then that makes them happier and they look around and they say where else can I work that I can get this. Nowhere. And even if someone offered me more money, significantly more, I know I wouldn’t be happy and then I wouldn’t have chance to discover and do anything, so why would I ever go anywhere else. And that’s the secret that goes on that people miss when you research and talk to people who there, been there for a long time and other similar organizations, the difference. And it’s the connectivity with the people.
In fact, when I was doing research for my TED Talk, the number one factor, the only factor that they could across every single team that they looked at, and they spend three years, and I don’t, spent three or four million dollars and hired researchers to basically build the perfect team at Google. Like what would be characteristics and what would make it up? Would it be IQ? Would it be finding genius engineers, even the company in all engineers, but is it technical people? What is it?
Well the number one thing they found out, and the only thing was psychological safety. And psychological safety is basically a fancy word for vulnerability in a sense that people on these teams new each other in a personal way and what was going on in and what went on. They were able to ask controversial questions in the group to challenge anyone’s ideas and they were just able to ask questions without people getting snarky or getting mad or upset about what was going. And that was it. And they discovered it because one of the researchers came across a team where the manager told the rest of the team he had cancer and he didn’t know if he was going to make it or not. And they saw the teams performance climb and then they figured out that was it.
So really, when you look at it, it’s not some fancy ping pong table. It’s actually spending time getting to know people and their experiences. Where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Their highs and their lows. And then basically, you can recreate what they’ve done in that company without spending almost any money to do it.
Absolutely love it. Absolutely love it. And if you’re just joining, we’re talking to Jason Treu. He’s an executive coach and we’re talking about the transparent work culture. Jason, can you share with the listeners where they can find more information about you.
Sure. You can go to website. It’s JasonTreu.com.
Fantastic. And when we get back from the break, I want to explore you’re TED X Talk a little bit further and talk about your game, Cards against Mundanity. So stay with us, we’ll be right back.
#jasontreuexecutivecoach #jasontreubooks #jasontreudallas #jasontreuentrepreneur #jasontreulinkedin #jasontreupodcast #jasontreutwitter #jasontreutumblr #jasontreucoachingprogram #jasontreubusinesscoach #jasontreubusinesscoaching #jasontreuyoutube #jasontreutumblr
