Team Building
Whether you are a family looking to work out the kinks in your relationships or a corporate office hoping to come together as a group, Shangrila’s Team Building Program can help you reach your goals. By consulting with our team building leader, Casey Ravitz, before your visit, you can lay out your objectives and decide what type of activities fit your needs. Every team is different, meaning that every team building experience must also be different. Here at Shangrila, we can shift any of our well-honed activities to help you make the progress you desire for your team.
We offer two different options for team building. For those looking for a classic approach, we have activities such as constructing teepees, bridge building and scavenger hunts. An activity like building a teepee would be perfect for a large group that finds itself fragmented and struggling to bond as a whole. By separating those whom would normal choose to be together and creating new squads to put up the teepees, these individuals will have to learn how to overcome their issues with each other to reach a common goal. This activity can be done with a time limit, as a competition or just for fun—sometimes not being able to complete a task teaches us more than doing something successfully.
Our second option involves groundwork with horses in an arena. Whatever the size or needs of your group, this new approach to team building gives an added level of insight to the inner workings of the team. As prey animals, horses are extremely aware of what is going on in a predator’s (i.e. your) mind. When doing one of our arena team building exercises, we learn about the team’s issues through both their actions and the behavior of the horses. Once you enter the arena, your team building leader will give you a relatively unstructured activity. For example, if given a task to move a horse over a low jump as a team, and one member of the group grows frustrated and takes over the task, even if he or she completes it successfully, we learn about how that individual deals with problems that arise within the work place—as well as how his or her coworkers react to such conduct. Furthermore, from the horse behavior, we learn more about how this type of action affects the group, even if the reaction is silent. That’s the beauty of working with a horse in the arena! It picks up on body language that we humans would miss.
Along with these larger team building exercises, your team building leader may add other activities in order to further dig into issues that come out during your visit. The Shangrila Team Building Program evolves with each group, learning more about what you need in order to progress to the next level. By asking questions, your team building leader will help you to ferret out hidden obstacles within your group. You can carve out a specific amount of time for discussion with your team building leader, or choose to have the team do their processing on their own time.