Team Building Builds Trust

Team Building Trust“Learning to trust is one of life’s most difficult tasks.” – Isaac Watts

A team without trust really isn’t a team. And when your employees fail to act as a team, it can affect your business and your customers/clients. Information may not be shared, employees may butt heads and battle over responsibilities, and tasks may not get done. Yikes! Fortunately, there is something you can do.

The Importance of Trust

Trust is defined as a “reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” In layman’s terms, trust is one person’s confidence in another. Can your employees rely on one another? Can they trust one another? If not, how do you change your corporate culture? Trust is essential to an effective team, an effective business. Without trust, there will undoubtedly be less collaboration, less innovation, less creativity, and far less productivity.

“You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don’t trust enough.” – Frank Crane

Unfortunately, you can’t force people to trust each other. That is just not how trust works. But you can put people in situations where they will learn to trust each other. This is where team building can help.

Building Trust through Team Building

One way to build trust is to put your employees in situations where they are forced out of their comfort zone and made to interact with employees they otherwise would not associate with. In business, like in high school, cliques can form and, sometimes inadvertently, isolate certain staff members. When this happens, communication and trust are definitely compromised.  Fortunately, team building can help break down barriers and get your employees to start trusting one another by putting them in situations that encourage them to interact, problem solve, and share ideas in order to achieve a specific goal. This will help improve communication and cohesiveness, and ultimately build trust. Exercises to Build Trust:  The key to trust exercises is that team members must communicate clearly and there must be a consequence to failure or people will not take it seriously.

  1. Example 1) Trust Walk: Participants are asked to walk while blindfolded with their partner giving only verbal instructions to the blindfolded person.  After some distance with a few turns and obstacles, switch places.
  2. Example 2) Mousetrap: Participants are put into small groups and teammates must verbally instruct team members how to place their hand on a live mousetrap while blindfolded.  It helps to first show people how to do this when not blindfolded.

Team Building with Terrapin Adventures

Through our highly rated team building experiences your entire group will increase their ability to problem solve, think creatively and collaborate with one another. Our Team Building Programs will help your group learn more about themselves and how to work better as a team. We service Maryland and Washington, D.C., and have traveled to other states as well, inside or outside.

Serious Team Building partnered with Serious Fun!

If you have any questions about Team Building and Trust, please call Terrapin Adventures at 301.725.1313, email us at info@terrapinadventures.com, or fill out the contact form on our website. You can also follow Terrapin Adventures us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, and Pinterest for up-to-date information on events, trends, and other fun and exciting outdoor activities.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2015 at 4:08 pm. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “ Team Building Builds Trust ”

  1. PulseActiv says:

    Team is an important aspect of a workplace and without trust a team has no future. Therefore, it’s important to build trust between employees and employer can encourage this by investing in different team building activities.