Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations,
team building, and goal of giving. This is the Seven Minute Leadership
Podcast with your host Paul fella Aldo. Hello everyone, and welcome to the
Seven Minute Leadership Podcast, Episode one fifty three and its team building on a
budget. And what if I told you that for just twenty five dollars you
could conduct an amazing two to three hour team building exercise that will get your
team to be able to communicate together, work together, problem solved together,
and engage many other of the leadership tools necessary for any high performing team.
So if I go all the way back to the first week of March twenty
twenty, when we were all caught off guard with the pandemic announcement, we
didn't have enough ppe, how are we going to pay for it, how
are we going to afford COVID sick time? All that stuff that happened at
the beginning of COVID. I assembled my leadership team and we literally locked ourselves
in our conference room and sketched out the battle plan for our EMS agency to
navigate this pandemic. We all had to work together, communicate effectively, be
in sync with one another at a level we never dreamed would ever come to
fruition. We always talked about this type of scenario, but when it doesn't
happen that often, it's hard for a nonprofit MS agency to invest that level
of money for something that may not come true. Lesson learned. So fast
forward to present day. I have some new members of my leadership team that
we're not with me during the pandemic. I wanted to recreate that exact scenario
for them, but I didn't want to use COVID or a future pandemic as
the scenario. I wanted it to be fun, engaging that would get them
all around the table, working and talking together to solve a problem. So
here's what I came up with and did a couple of weeks ago from my
team. So, if you go to Amazon in search for something called Unsolved
case Files, it's an interactive murder mystery where your team has to work together
to solve a murder case. It's twenty five bucks, and here's what you
get. A case file in an evidence bag, newspaper clippings, mugshots,
witness and suspect statements, crime scene photos, and various other surprise things in
that folder. It was legit. It all looked real. To make it
even more realistic, I assembled my team. They had no idea what we
were going to do that day other than it was a team building exercise,
and I had already talked to our local police chief and gave him the case
file. He walked into the conference room the morning of the exercise and said
something to the effect of, we need your help. We have this cold
case that we need your help solving. He read a brief overview of the
murder, slapped the case file down on the table, and just walked away.
Now the look on my team's face was priceless, and the opening five
minutes was what I expected. They kind of looked at each other waiting for
someone to make the first move, and finally someone reached for the folder and
cracked it open. Someone else started separating all the documents. Someone else went
to the whiteboard and started scribing notes and drawing the lines to connect the people.
It was like watching one of those crime shows, and as their boss,
it was an incredibly rewarding experience to see them off rating outside of their
normal element and comfort zone, and in a little over two hours they solve
the case. The point of all this is that if you're struggling with the
whole teamwork concept, you don't have to spend a thousand bucks to truck your
staff off to some retreat and have them stand on picnic tables and fall backwards
into each other's arms. This was twenty five dollars. I mean, I
bought them lunch too, but that wasn't a terrible expense. But you can
do this on a dirt cheap budget and it's fun. Fun to the point
that later that night, when I was getting ready for bed, one of
the attendees texted me and said, I can't stop thinking about today's exercise.
It felt so real and this was such a cool experience. And I never
have my people text me like that after any training that we do, and
we do some pretty cool real world training all the time. So this was
undoubtedly a winner of an idea and a great team building exercise. I think
that they will talk about for a long long time. So team building is
necessary. Sometimes you just have to get creative with your approach to reach your
desired objectives for your team. It turns out this scenario got my staff working
and communicating together, and in that they learn some valuable lessons about attention to
detail, organization, listening to each other, and more importantly, listening to
other people's point of view. Aren't those all the necessary qualities that any high
performing team needs to possess. This has been the seven Minute Leadership Podcast,
and I thank you for listening. For more Paul Fellovaledo podcasts, visit Paul
Fellovalito dot com