Top Five Tips for Summer Team Building

Fun and food are musts!

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We’re having fun now! Who put the sunglasses on that pineapple?

Photo by Pineapple Supply Co. on Unsplash

Typically, I try to write posts that will be helpful to people given the time of year but given that it’s the very end of May, I feel as if most people are just trying to get over the finish line. I thought about doing a “Top Five Ways to Manage Nasty, End Of Year Disciplinary Situations” but I couldn’t bring myself to go there. I hope you are all celebrating your wonderful students instead of dealing with people doing inconvenient and complicated people things. For any of you who are in that place, I wish that you find a solution helping the rule breaking student move forward and allows the school to maintain its integrity. Sometimes, that is quite a tall order!

Instead, here’s a top five for something more fun to think about - doing some team building over the summer, for whatever team you lead. I know there are probably a bunch of leaders out there rolling their eyes and thinking, “Fun? Seriously?” Well maybe this post is particularly for you!

There are so few times during the school year where we have the luxury to carve out time just to focus on supporting the work of our teams - how they’re functioning, how their partnership can improve, what they want to accomplish as a team in the upcoming year. Summer is one of those times. And I would like to put in a special plug for the end of year retreat - ideally you can do an end of the year AND an end of the summer retreat. But I know it can take a lot to make those happen.

There’s a place for personality tests and strengths inventories and egg drop contests and group reading of a book, especially as a vehicle for a newish team to get to know each other. But my strong preference is to get into it with things that are real rather than abstractions or metaphors - to explore what’s going on with people, to support interpersonal connections, to put a real dilemma out there for consideration. But leaders, you do you.

ONE

Nail down a date and time before everyone scatters.

Maybe this is a regular part of your planning and you have your date and time in place. Bravo, you! If not, even if the idea of devising this plan now really makes you want to lie down and take a nap, do it anyway. You don’t need a plan. You don’t need a fancy location. You don’t need to have figured out the catering. The scarcest resource is everyone’s time