Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and goal of giving. This is the Seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul fella Aldo. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Seven Minute Leadership Podcast, Episode one fifty three and its team building on a
budget. And what if I told you that for just twenty five dollars you could conduct an amazing two to three hour team building exercise that will get your team to be able to communicate together, work together, problem solved together, and engage many other of the leadership tools necessary for any high performing team.
So if I go all the way back to the first week of March twenty twenty, when we were all caught off guard with the pandemic announcement, we didn't have enough ppe, how are we going to pay for it, how are we going to afford COVID sick time? All that stuff that happened at the beginning of COVID. I assembled my leadership team and we literally locked ourselves in our conference room and sketched out the battle plan for our EMS agency to
navigate this pandemic. We all had to work together, communicate effectively, be in sync with one another at a level we never dreamed would ever come to fruition. We always talked about this type of scenario, but when it doesn't happen that often, it's hard for a nonprofit MS agency to invest that level of money for something that may not come true. Lesson learned. So fast forward to present day. I have some new members of my leadership team that
we're not with me during the pandemic. I wanted to recreate that exact scenario for them, but I didn't want to use COVID or a future pandemic as the scenario. I wanted it to be fun, engaging that would get them all around the table, working and talking together to solve a problem. So here's what I came up with and did a couple of weeks ago from my
team. So, if you go to Amazon in search for something called Unsolved case Files, it's an interactive murder mystery where your team has to work together to solve a murder case. It's twenty five bucks, and here's what you get. A case file in an evidence bag, newspaper clippings, mugshots, witness and suspect statements, crime scene photos, and various other surprise things in that folder. It was legit. It all looked real. To make it
even more realistic, I assembled my team. They had no idea what we were going to do that day other than it was a team building exercise, and I had already talked to our local police chief and gave him the case file. He walked into the conference room the morning of the exercise and said something to the effect of, we need your help. We have this cold case that we need your help solving. He read a brief overview of the murder, slapped the case file down on the table, and just walked away.
Now the look on my team's face was priceless, and the opening five minutes was what I expected. They kind of looked at each other waiting for someone to make the first move, and finally someone reached for the folder and cracked it open. Someone else started separating all the documents. Someone else went to the whiteboard and started scribing notes and drawing the lines to connect the people.
It was like watching one of those crime shows, and as their boss, it was an incredibly rewarding experience to see them off rating outside of their normal element and comfort zone, and in a little over two hours they solve the case. The point of all this is that if you're struggling with the whole teamwork concept, you don't have to spend a thousand bucks to truck your staff off to some retreat and have them stand on picnic tables and fall backwards
into each other's arms. This was twenty five dollars. I mean, I bought them lunch too, but that wasn't a terrible expense. But you can do this on a dirt cheap budget and it's fun. Fun to the point that later that night, when I was getting ready for bed, one of the attendees texted me and said, I can't stop thinking about today's exercise. It felt so real and this was such a cool experience. And I never have my people text me like that after any training that we do, and
we do some pretty cool real world training all the time. So this was undoubtedly a winner of an idea and a great team building exercise. I think that they will talk about for a long long time. So team building is necessary. Sometimes you just have to get creative with your approach to reach your
desired objectives for your team. It turns out this scenario got my staff working and communicating together, and in that they learn some valuable lessons about attention to detail, organization, listening to each other, and more importantly, listening to other people's point of view. Aren't those all the necessary qualities that any high performing team needs to possess. This has been the seven Minute Leadership Podcast,
and I thank you for listening. For more Paul Fellovaledo podcasts, visit Paul Fellovalito dot com