Teambuilding! What is that?
Simply put, teambuilding is the foundation of any group of people working together well towards a common purpose. When groups of people come together for the first time, they don't work together smoothly. Even organizations that have been working together for decades may experience a breakdown in group dynamics. There may be communication gaps, differences in understanding group purposes, methods, and even ethics. People have different leadership styles, customs, and conventions that they follow--and they may be under the influence of debilitating stories about themselves, the group, or members within the group. Bringing people together and creating a bond through teambuilding is a process of creating a new group story, one where each member can envision where they fit and how they operate within the context of a group setting.
So what? Why do we need teambuilding?
New organizations may not have the foundation of experience to build upon. They may be temporary groups that come together only for a single project and don't have time for an extended process of group solidification. Organizations that have been working towards the same ends for years may even begin to have trouble with the relationships between contributors to that group. When companies, schools, projects, or teams bring on new people or move out favorites, existing stories and meaning which have held the group together for so long may become disrupted. NewLand Camps recognizes the need for teambuilding and how it can help to re-shape stories of efficacy and team.
Who needs teambuilding?
Whenever a group of people comes together in pursuit of a common goal, teambuilding can help them with the difficulties inherent in establishing trust, creating structures of communication, and forming a bond of trust and mutual reliance. Groups may go through the forming, storming, norming, and performing stages of group development quickly and easily, or they may get stuck somewhere along the line. Optimal performance is reduced. Goals become more difficult, even impossible, to achieve. Whether it is a group of two or a group of two hundred, teambuilding is a method for bringing people into alignment through experiential learning. Even if a group is performing 'good enough', teambuilding leverages organizational psychology to optimize performance from 'good enough' to excellence.
Why NewLand Camps?
NewLand Camps takes up the story analogy of teambuilding. Following the lead of organizational psychologists, sociologists, ethnographers, and social scientists, NewLand Camps has come to understand that the basic unit of organized meaning for us is the story. Humans are storytelling masters! Unlike computers, which store information as magnetic, electrical, photonic, or other kinds of impulses, humans use the brain to store and story information in a process called coding. For humans, interconnected and layered networks of bioelectrical impulses have no written code. Humans instead have ways of using and transforming information from the body and brain to create stories. This 'story' coding allows us to know not only the what of information, but also the who, when, how, and why of true understanding. This is why stories have the ability to transport us towards or away from our goals, into and out of different states of mind, take us high into the sky or ground us firmly on mother Earth. They are the very fabric of our ability to work and move together.
As a proponent of the story analogy, NewLand Camps uses a process of teambuilding that first learns about the current problematic stories that are propagating within an organization, disrupts them through an experiential process, and rebuilds them anew through group reflection and integration. Commemorating these new stories and the meaning that has built them up assists the group in maintaining effective, caring interrelationships to propel a group to excellence.
Accellerate to excellence with NewLand Camps! Contact us today for a free consultation.