The BEST Moves
Name your why before you pick the program
Most planners pick the activity first and reverse-engineer the reason. Do it the other way round and about 90% of the menu disappears, including most of ours.
4 min read The move is free From Your Roadmap to Team Building
How to run it
You can do all of this yourself, on Monday, without calling anybody.
Before you open a single program page, finish this sentence: this event is for ______.
One sentence. If you cannot finish it, you are not ready to get quotes, and every vendor you call will happily fill in the blank for you with whatever they are best at selling.
Pick your objective from the list of seventeen.
The list below is the one the Association of Destination Management Executives International publishes, and it is the one we work from. Pick one. Two if you must. Not five.
Cross off every program that does not serve it.
Sixty minutes of A Minute 2 Win It is a genuinely good engagement program and completely the wrong tool for teaching managers conflict resolution. Both facts are true at once.
Lead the vendor call with the objective, not the date.
It changes what gets recommended, and it tells you fast whether the person on the phone is listening or reading from a menu.
The seventeen
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Connection
- Having fun together
- New hires and re-organization
- Motivating a team
- Diversity and inclusion
- New strategy or direction
- Learning about themselves
- Celebrating achievements
- Trust and respect
- Team-building pillars
- Goal setting
- Accountability
- Dealing with team conflict
- Stress management
- Problem solving
Watch out: “Because we have budget left” is a real reason and a fine one. It is still not an objective. Write the objective anyway.
Why it works
The mechanism, not the marketing.
A team building program can only optimise for one thing, and formats differ in what they reward. A fast competitive game rewards speed, volume and nerve. A facilitated workshop rewards reflection and disclosure, which are close to the opposite. Pick the activity first and you have quietly chosen which of those you are rewarding, then hope it matches a goal you never wrote down. Naming the objective first inverts the order: the goal rules out every format that rewards the wrong behaviour, and what is left is a short list instead of a catalogue. It also changes the vendor call, because a good partner answers a stated objective and a bad one reads you the menu.
“A company brings together 100 salespeople with the goal of teaching them to collaborate. But these reps work in silos, and not one of them is going to give away their best practices to 99 other salespeople. Put 30 managers from across the country in a room, though, and they share everything, because they are not competing.”
Roy Charette on goal-to-activity mismatch, in 10 Business Scenarios Where Team Building Leads to Success (p. 143)
The list most planners have never seen
17
objectives on the list published by the Association of Destination Management Executives International, reproduced in our eBooks. It is the menu behind the menu.
ADMEI Handbook
How many to pick from it
One
Two if you must. A program that claims to hit all seventeen hits none of them, and a brief that lists five is a brief nobody can quote back to you.
Where this move came from
Or take the whole book.
Your Roadmap to Successful Corporate Team Building
Choosing a venue, the value of a real facilitator, and how to customize a program so it does the job you hired it for.
Send me the eBook
No event in mind yet? Take the reading. PDF straight to your inbox, and a real person follows up — the question at the bottom tells us when that is actually useful.
Programs that do this for you
If you would rather not run it yourself, these are built around the same job.
