Conference Team Building vs Team Building for Development
Team Building events at a conference usually have time and budgetary constraints placed upon them that are not as common on more strategic level team and leadership development approaches.
As a consequence of this it is important to fairly distinguish between the expected outcomes that can be derived within a stand-alone conference event as opposed to a longer term or more strategic team building initiative that may dovetail into something like a 12 month accelerated teaming programme.
There seems to be trend for conference based team building approaches to be limited to a timeslot of 2 hours to half a day. Whilst this can certainly give enough time for a quality business game or experience to be conducted, it may leave little time either side for meaningful diagnostics or linkage to business outcomes.
Meetings based events when stand-alone can be a great way to playfully underpin or re enforce conference issues and themes along with making a meeting memorable and a stronger platform for networking and relationship building.
Strategic and developmental team building programmes tend to be far more than just stand-alone events. They create an overarching timeline that may consist of profiling tools, sub team interviews and diagnostics which are then followed up with at least 12 months of short and multi day interventions that all drive towards lasting outcomes and positive change.
Whilst “events” certainly can form some of the constituent elements of a long-term programme, they are not simply stand-alone elements. Great results and insights can definitely be gained from high quality team building solutions at a meeting, but far greater value and real world outcomes will come from them being dovetailed into a broader and longer term strategy.