Many corporate team building off-sites start out with good intentions, but end up being less than a Grand Slam event.

When you only have one chance to make it a success, how can you increase your odds of getting "a hole in one" -- on every hole?

I was recently asked in an interview, along with a number of other industry experts, "How do YOU create a team building event that is both fun AND effective?"

And this was my response:

"There is so much to say on the subject, as my company BigBlueGumball specializes in facilitating teambuilding workshops and off-sites for all types of organizations (boards, senior leadership teams, departments, project teams, etc.). And I teach a graduate course at NYU entitled, “Leadership & Team Building” as well.

Our company’s motto and approach is summed up and exemplified in the three words “Educate, Engage, and Excite” by making every team building experience high-energy, fast-paced, interactive, impactful, memorable, and fun – with the ultimate objective of setting a team up for success.

My philosophy is that “Team BONDING needs to come before Team BUILDING.”^TM In brief, this means that before focusing on the work, we need to focus on the people.

Or, in other words, “We need to connect TO each other, if we want to work better WITH each other.

That includes doing engaging, interactive, fun – but not cheesy or clichéd! – team-based activities that help colleagues connect through getting to know one another just a little bit better.

We have a variety of different innovative exercises we draw upon to achieve this objective, and we customize every activity to each specific group based on a range of variables. We try to be innovative and do the unexpected, so no old-fashioned “catch-your-teammate-while-blindfolded” exercises for us. And if you’re looking forward to walking on hot coals, then you’ve come to the wrong place.

We use a variety of creative, professional methods and techniques – time-tested, research-based, and grounded in science – to help teams collectively come up with their own Guiding Principles, Team Charter, and/or Road Map that will immediately get them working together, defining roles and responsibilities, and starting to build trust and mutual accountability, while practicing the principle that (as Dale Carnegie put it), “People support a world they help create.”

In addition, when appropriate, we have a variety of simple assessments and exercises that help participants identify their own and one another’s preferred behavioral styles and personal preferences, for example, our Passion/Skill Matrix model, which supports the powerful notion (by management guru F.W. Taylor) that “People do best…what they like best to do.”

Other classic concepts and exercises we often incorporate into our team building workshops include Tuckman’s “Four Stages of Team Development” (forming, storming, norming, performing); Katzenbach’s “Six Team Basics”; Lencioni’s “Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” and more.

But, while based in the best of Harvard Business School-style models and methods, there is no “lecturing” in our teambuilding events: everything we do is experiential as we strongly believe, as the research shows, that people learn best by “doing.” And this has been proven to maximize the impact and effectiveness of the teambuilding experience so that when the event is over, and the teams eventually go back to work, they find that they will, going forward, work better together.

To sum up, the bottom line is that when a teambuilding event is done successfully, the outcome is – not just that they had a good time – but that they discover the truth in the classic maxim:

“As a T-E-A-M…Together Everyone Achieves More.”