“Unity is strength,” “two heads are better than one,” there are plenty of quotes that reflect how important it is to know to work as a team. But learning to work and create together takes time and practice.
When you are part of a team, you find yourself with people with different personalities and creative processes. That’s why it is an excellent idea to try some activities to learn how to work together to take the best of everybody for future projects.
Here you will find some games, activities, and exercises to get to know each other and grow as a team.
This game doesn’t have a limit of players, but if your group is too big, it might not be very entertaining to wait a long time. Probably 8 would be a not-so-big team that can still enjoy this activity.
Take a piece of paper, a pencil, or a pen and write the beginning of a story until you leave a word in the second line. It doesn’t matter if your sentence didn’t end up making much sense by finishing in that word.
Fold the top of the paper just enough to cover the first line and let the word in the second line visible to the next person.
Pass the paper and the pencil to the person beside you. They will continue the story in the second line without reading what you wrote in the first one. They should finish with a single word in the third line.
Now, they have to fold the top again to cover their part of the story, and the third person repeats the process.
Pass the paper and keep writing until you get to the end of the sheet. Once you do, unfold the paper and read what you have written together. It may not make perfect sense, but it will definitely give you some laughs.
With this game, everybody lets their imagination flow just with one word. If you know each other a little, you will recognize who wrote what just by what a line says or its wording.
For this activity, you will need paper, a lot of pencils, and a timer.
Choose something that could inspire a story. It could be a short dialogue, a writing prompt you found online, a question you want everyone to answer, or a painting. This will be your “seed.”
As the seed is revealed, the timer should start counting down. Give as much—or little— time as you’d like. You could go from five minutes to 30 seconds.
During that time, everybody will write a story based on or using the seed. And when the time is over, everyone stops and shares their result.
Since this one doesn’t take turns to start creating, the group could be even bigger than in the previous activity. But still, it would be recommended to give less time as the group goes bigger so that the results are shorter and easier to share.
This can be a short activity in which everybody lets the pressure of time and the seed feed their creativity and get to know each other better.
Now, you could use this for a project in its development stage. The seed can be the main idea or a problem that needs to be solved. Give a little more time if required, and then everybody shares what they came up with.
No matter how crazy the idea, everything should be taken into account. Once everybody’s ideas were shared, you could start voting for the group's favorite ones. You could even combine different ideas and create something from there.
Using this for problem-solving or the development stage of a creative project will not only let people be creative and leave behind the fear of participating, but will make everyone feel heard and part of the group.
Give everyone time to write their likes, hobbies, or abilities. You can even give some examples that anyone can add to their list. Like “being a super-hero geek,” “knowing to play the piano,” “good at math,” “making cocktails,” or “Disney fan.”
Now, if you have a bigger group, separate them into groups of three to five people and let them read their lists to their team.
For every item on the list they read, the rest of the group will raise their hand if they share this trait with the person reading, even if it wasn’t written in their own list. The person reading will write the name of the people who share this trait with them, finding the “Common ground” in the group. The items left with no names will be their “Unique Powers.”
Once everybody has read their lists, they should find a way for the common ground and the special powers to work together.
For example, you have a great singer, a passionate cook, and an excellent time manager. They found out their common ground is that they all are into musicals. So, they could think of a musical-themed restaurant with live shows every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday!
This exercise will let people connect through things they have in common and find ways their differences are traits that can contribute to a group goal.
For this one, prepare a timer; everyone should have a canvas and something to draw or paint with. Name the canvases, so you know the original owner of every canvas.
Give the team a couple of minutes to draw or paint anything they want. Once the time is over, everyone should give their canvas to the person beside them to let them continue with the painting or drawing.
Do this until most of the art pieces look finished. Now you can see all the collective art pieces the group made. You could even ask the original owner what they were going for at the beginning and compare it to what it ended up being.
This activity is relaxing and lets people create based on what is given to them without judging it. Starting to see opportunities everywhere while helping to create masterpieces.
This is the perfect activity for groups full of extroverted people. Improv is all about group creativity. You have to be very focused on what your teammates are proposing for the scene to then contribute for it to be something interesting.
The idea of improv games is to give short prompts to the team and start creating right on the spot and catch the idea of your partner to make it bigger and better.
There are plenty of improv games ideas everywhere, but one that you could start with is to prepare some bags with words, phrases, or dialogues. Then, one member of the group takes one piece of paper out, reads it aloud, and the scene begins. There should also be someone else that determines when the scene is over.
This will help people improve their fast thinking, make everybody laugh, and have a good time.
Now is your time to make your creativity flow! These are only examples of activities that will help your team get together and learn to create as one, genuinely making everyone a part of it. Letting them have fun while getting to know each other better and learning to work toward a single goal.
Having various skills or hobbies can be very significant when working with a team. New knowledge is always welcome and beneficial for the person who knows about something and those who can learn from it.
If you want to broaden your talents and knowledge, you can find many creative courses in Skillademia that can help you. For example, you may like to learn more about using Excel, have always wanted to make 3D models, or even learn a new language! Check our courses and find your best fit.
