Success Stories
TEAM BUILDING THROUGH BEST!
After Louise Barnett attended her BEST Leader training day at Birmingham Football Club, which was useful in laying down what BEST was about and how the workshop should be formatted. Louise knew that she needed to think of a fun ice-breaker to get everyone talking.
Being a member of the Communications and Information Team, Louise was a little daunted about the prospect of preparing a presentation to the creative minds of the team. On top of that she had last years workshop to beat. Last year the previous BEST team leader, Mitch Schofield, now acting head of the Communications and Information team, and then BEST Leader, had changed the name of BEST to Bacon, Eggs, Sausage and Tomato and provided a sample of these- which proved to be a real winner!
Louise decided that one way that she could involve all members of the team was a music quiz. Before the workshop, Louise asked everyone briefly what their music tastes were which helped to make sure that she could include all her teams particular music interests in the quiz, but it also built up some anticipation and curiosity in advance about the BEST workshop.
Louise had put together ‘BEST – inspirational, slightly tacky, music quiz’. This involved playing a piece of music and then in small teams, the team had to fill in the gaps in the paragraph Louise had given them relating to BEST, using the title of each song they heard.
This worked well as people paired up with people who had different music tastes to themselves, rather than who they generally work with. This got people talking to each other and proved a good team building exercise. It was also was a good way of spelling out the reasons why BEST is a positive experience as well as being good fun!
After doing the BEST quiz, the ice had been broken and people were happy to contribute to the workshop. The team discussed lots of actions that could be put forward, to change the way that the team works in 2008 and lots of these have now been put in place.
