Team Building Puzzles

Team building puzzles, games and activities are used to help build efficient teams on company away days. The public perception of it is often a day when grown men and women play treasure hunts. This does happen, and it can have real value too, but most people are not too sure exactly what puzzles and games can achieve and often don't see their true value.

Puzzles can force teams to work together and solve a problem. Sometimes it is felt that a puzzle or problem to be solved is all that is needed. The thinking usually assumes that a team's skill sets can be harnessed through these activities and as a result the team will operate on a more efficient level. While this can be useful as part of the process, it should not be viewed as the only part of the process.

The puzzles and games that are chosen as part of a company away day should be chosen carefully. They should be in line with the skill sets of the team in question. If they are too easy to solve, the team will gain a false sense of their achievement, and if they are too difficult they will fail.

When a team that is put on to a test fails, each member will feel a greater than usual sense of loss and lack of achievement. This has a very negative impact on the entire process and is difficult to reverse. It is for this reason that the puzzles chosen should definitely be achievable by the team, though not too easily so.

Because failure is perceived to be a devastating loss by any determined team, it should be avoided at all costs. Achievement should be difficult, but possible.

For that reason all kinds of competitive games and puzzles do not work well in company away days.

With team building puzzles based on competitions there have to be losers, and while the winners can feel happy with the achievement, the losers will not. They will feel that they have failed and that they themselves are failures. That is not the best message to take away from a company away day.

It actually goes further than that even. Johnson and Johnson from the University of Minnesota reported that in studies between competitive and cooperative groups in classrooms, it was the cooperative groups who gained the advantage a highly impressive 87 percent of the time.

It seems that we like to be a part of a team that is all pulling together. We gain a lot from the feeling of being an important participant in such a group where cooperation is the model used. By comparison, we find little reason to continue learning if the only incentive is to beat a competitor. Team building puzzles also work best when this is taken into consideration.

It could be said that the single most important part of a company away day is the games and puzzles that the provider sets up. The success of failure of the entire exercise can rest entirely on the choice of the team building puzzles.