The top five lessons team leaders can learn from bees

When it comes to working as a team, studies show that bees really are the best.  Here are our top five lessons we can apply to our own working lives.

1. Honest communication and sharing information is at the heart of the team.
Bees use vibrations and pheromones to help pass complex messages.  We have so much technology to help us communicate; let’s not forget that using it with honesty is they key to excellent communication.  …

Top Five Christmas Party Clangers

The Christmas office party is back on the agenda.  If you fear organising a potential festive farce, take a look at our five most cringe worthy Christmas party pitfalls and our Fresh approach to dodging the dodgy party.

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At number five. The sit-down meal. …

New Team Activity – Catapult Conundrum

Our latest team building activity combines mental agility with collaboration, construction and commercial prowess.

 

This original team building challenge from Fresh Tracks sees teams compete in a catapult competition. …

Exercises to Support Covey’s 7 Habits

Along with the 15 million people who have bought the book, we love Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We also firmly believe in experiential learning and so we’ve selected the following 7 training exercises to bring each habit to life and help to turn Covey’s ideas into behaviours. 

If the exercises aren’t familiar to you and you’d like some trainer notes, click here to make a request….

DIY Team Building – 6 Solutions

As budgets tighten and in-house trainers look for more inspiring ways to get their message across, our collection of licensed team and leadership activities are proving popular both at home and abroad.

Spicing up induction programmes and providing new managers with a safe environment in which to practice taking the lead are amongst the many ways in which our exercises are being used.  …

The Case for Experiential Learning – 5 ways we learn better by doing than listening

For years practical activities have been used in team building to help people get to know each other ‘off the job’. In management development case studies and role plays are used to turn theories into experience.

Experiential learning is more acceptable now than at any time in the past as participants have become less fearful of leaving the security of the classroom, relishing the opportunity to take a break from the monotony of the lectures.  …

Playing with the Toy Makers – When Leapfrog came to Play

Earlier this year we worked with Leapfrog – a fast paced company making educational toys whose recent growth had brought significant changes, particularly among the leadership team.

Our approach was to identify the potential of each member of the team using the Strengths Deployment Inventory, a questionnaire based on Jungian psychology that plots team members’ strengths graphically.  …

Short Notice Team Events

January is a time for new beginnings, and many leaders will have scheduled time to review 2012 and talk through the challenges and opportunities for 2013 with their team.

If you haven’t put a date in the diary don’t worry we can provide a venue, facilitator and team activity during the first few weeks of the new year, and we even have some capacity in late December.  …

Does Size Matter in Teams?

This year’s Olympics saw rowing teams of eight, four and two. In handball teams of seven; in hockey 16 and in volleyball six. So should team size be dictated just by the task, or are there other factors to consider?

It could be assumed that the larger the team the more productive they are as a whole but the opposite seems to be true.  Very often larger teams are in fact less efficient per capita. In rowing and in the workplace, overall performance is as dependent on coordination across the team as it is on the sheer effort of individual team members.  …

Christmas Team Building Events

Now that the summer of sport has cooled into mellow autumn it’s time to start planning for your team’s Christmas events.

Make the most of this end of year celebration by choosing a Christmas team building event that will energize, inspire and motivate as Olympic memories fade and the cool nights lengthen.  Here are six winning activities that will add more than cranberry sauce to your festive meal:

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