Team Building Lesson Plans: Examples

This is a collection of team building lesson plans and examples for teachers and managers.

Team building lesson plans are guides to running effective exercises. The most successful team building efforts begin with a clear goal and follow specific directions. A good leader allows teammates time to reflect at the end of the activity, and measures the impact of the exercise on team member’s work behavior.

With proper organization, you can easily plan and execute team activities that encourage participation and achieve the intended results.

These plans are similar to team building plans, team building worksheets and team building tips.

This article contains:

• What is a team building lesson plan?
• What are team building objectives/What are team building goals?
• How do you measure team building success?
• What are examples of team building objectives and goals?
• Team building lesson plan templates
• Team building lesson plan examples

Here is what you need to know.

What is a team building lesson plan?

A team building lesson plan is a step-by-step guide that outlines a team building exercise or event. The plan divides an activity into individual components such as objectives, introduction, main activity, closure, and assessment. These lesson plans allow leaders to break an exercise into phases, ensuring that the activity has a clear direction and measurable results.

What are team building objectives/What are team building goals?

Traditionally, team building objectives refer to the larger organizational impact of team building exercises, while team building goals indicate the immediate aims of activities. In terms of lesson plans, goals and objectives are interchangeable. Whether you target a particular behavior of your team or the culture of the company at large, you should have a clear objective in mind when you plan an activity. Without identifying a clear endpoint, your team building efforts will be haphazard and you may not achieve desirable results.

Learn more about team building objectives.

How do you measure team building success?

To measure team building success, you will first need to analyze your team’s strengths and weaknesses, create a baseline, and decide on an objective. Once you select a team building goal, you can design an activity around that objective. Be sure to create a way to determine whether or not your team meets the objective. Many facilitators make the mistake of deeming a team building activity a success immediately upon completion on the basis that employees had fun. While execution and enjoyment are important factors to team building, you should also target some specific teamwork competency and designate a way to monitor the potential change in your team’s performance.

For instance, if your goal is to improve communication, then you may observe average message response time or look for a change in email length or frequency. If your objective is to build rapport among teammates, then you may look out for an uptick in casual interactions like communal coffee breaks or coworker shout-outs on a team bulletin board.

What are examples of team building objectives and goals?

There are many different possible objectives and goals for team building. Here are a few.

Sample team building objectives:

• Establish connections between team members
• Increase communication
• Foster camaraderie
• Sharpen problem-solving skills
• Improve morale
• Boost employee engagement
• Build trust
• Practice conflict resolution
• Encourage negotiation and compromise
• Promote confidence and leadership
• Teach effective delegation
• Raise productivity

You may choose a combination of these goals for your desired result. As long as you establish at least one objective for your activity, you can design a smart plan with a clear endpoint.

Team building lesson plan template

We created a team building lesson plan template you can use to map out your own game plan.

Feel free to adjust the worksheet as necessary and add extra fields you wish to address in your planning process.

Team building lesson plan example

To demonstrate how a completed team building lesson plan may look, we filled in the fields based on the common team building challenge Frostbite. See the example below.

As you can see, this sample clearly outlines the goal, materials, stages of the activity, as well as the follow-up.

Conclusion

Lesson plans act as educational roadmaps. These plans break subjects into steps and help teachers stay on track. While mapping out every activity may not be necessary, lesson plans come in handy for complex exercises, and are a boon to leaders new to team building. There are many other tools you can use to structure your efforts.

Feel free to check out our article on team building skills and this roundup of team building statistics for more information.