It might be the start of a bad joke. “How many leaders does it take to change a light bulb?” But the reality is that bringing together leaders and asking them to work together can sometimes raise interesting challenges. Issues around style, decision making and expected outcomes often emerge when you bring together leaders who are each used to managing a piece of an organization with some level of autonomy.

Those same challenges create a ripe opportunity. Encouraging a group of leaders to take part in a team building exercise, like building a bike or helping a local charity, can create powerful results. The benefits of team building, along with emerging trends of collaborative leadership and social networking, can help bring these valuable outcomes to your management team.

Listening

Successful leaders are good listeners. They take time to sift through information and stories to get at the heart of both challenges and solutions. When bringing together a group of strong leaders and requiring a task that is outside of their daily responsibilities, it helps to get them back to the basics of leadership through listening and working as a team.

Leadership Style

Understanding personal leadership style, as an individual and as a team, provides endless dividends to an organization. It allows leaders to identify what a team needs to have balance and success in the workplace. Team building events provide an ideal forum to discuss these styles with a management team and experience first hand how similarities and differences play a role in achieving a goal.

Perspective

Gaining insight about the perspective of your team or your customer can be one of the best lessons that leaders can have. Team building events open the door to understanding the different roles that team members play and how customers might experience the organization. Breaking down how a group handled building a bike, for example, allows for discussions about every stage of the business process from supplying materials and handling operations to the satisfaction of customers.
Team building events are the perfect exercise in the human dynamics of solving problems and achieving a common goal, and often it is an experience that can benefit management teams more than anyone else in the organization.