The Road Ahead: Teambuilding Exercise For Leadership Teams

Hi Guys,

One exercise that can be used with senior management teams for team-building workshops. Hope you find it useful. Please do share your comments and feedback.

Cheers,
Rakesh

Hello, Sir

It's really a good exercise. Could you explain it in a broader sense?

Q1. In what type of companies is this exercise used? Name a few of them.

Q2. There are many more exercises with the same objectives, so why this one? It's just a query because I'm an MBA (H.R.) student. So, it's very necessary to know this.

Regards,
Shaleen Srivastava.

Dear All,

Can anyone tell me the important barriers to communication in an organization that affect the business processes severely? Also, please provide me with solutions for overcoming these barriers.

Thanks in advance,
Anil Kumar

Hello Anil,

Here are some of the barriers to effective communication:

(1) Filtering - It refers to senders purposely manipulating information so it will be seen more favorably by the receiver.

(2) Selective perception - This is when the receiver in the communication process selectively sees and hears based on their needs, motivations, experiences, background, and other personal characteristics.

(3) Information Overload - Individuals have a finite capacity for processing data. When the information we have to work with exceeds our processing capacity, the result is information overload. Hence, they tend to select out, ignore, pass over, or forget the information.

(4) Emotions - How the receiver feels at the time of receiving communication will influence how he or she interprets it. The same message received when you are angry or distraught is often interpreted differently from when you are happy.

(5) Language - Words mean different things to different people. Age, education, and cultural background are three of the more obvious variables that influence the language a person uses and the definitions he or she gives to words.

Regards,
Garima Sengar

Basically, a barrier to communication is a lack of understanding of the content & context of the message. The factors leading to this are:

1. Lack of interest in the topic/subject by the recipient
2. Lack of listening skills on the part of the recipient
3. Lack of clarity of thoughts and ambiguous message conveyed by the sender
4. Noise - External & Internal (External noise includes disturbances, etc.) and Internal noise is again due to the fact that our mind processes faster, and we jump to conclusions (sometimes you would have seen the tendency on the part of some persons to complete the sentences on your behalf).
5. Follow CCC while delivering your message across - Clear, Concise & Crisp.

Hope this meets your query and helps you to think along these lines.

Regards,
H M Thakur

Hi Shaleen,

Thanks for your comments. Let me try to answer both the queries.

1. We have seen it work well for quite a few of our corporate clients. As mentioned in the article, it works especially well when you have senior management groups who might be a bit skeptical about conventional team-building activities, which often turn out to be a day of fun minus the learning component. We have found it useful for visioning exercises for teams where the team is trying to set a direction to follow for a specific time frame, either medium or long term.

2. Like you said, there are quite a few other exercises as well that achieve similar objectives. This is just one among the many that could be used. As mentioned earlier, this works best when you have small senior management teams where members have known each other for some time at least and are comfortable sharing with each other because the discussions can be quite deep and engaging. Therefore, it is important to have a certain level of mutual trust before the exercise so that they are comfortable sharing, especially their vulnerabilities.

I will try to share more exercises around the same as well.

Do let me know if you have any other queries.

Regards, Rakesh +91 9999949133