Teams are here to stay and teams that have fun together, work better together, and produce more. Employers who are lucky enough to have good relationships between employees know that better tasks flow out of better relationships—the better the relationship, the better the task output. Team initiatives provide a fun learning environment out of which relationships are strengthened. Team initiatives further provide the learning context from which truths and principle analysis are derived. Team initiatives involve the employees with hands-on, experiential learning. This learning process forces the employee to come to a new point of intellectual understanding or attitudinal change. The facilitation of these experiences then prompts the participants to provide a verbal or written response to articulate the lessons learned.

Through these initiatives, or elements, individuals are treated as part of a team and yet valued as individuals. Trust, communication and many other values are built into teams through the elements and teammates learn new ways of cooperation. Teams experience new levels of synergy through playing together as they experience, express and process emotions and experiences in fresh ways.

Team initiatives are learning tools in and of themselves, but more importantly they facilitate learning at a deeper level. Learning is internalized better if it starts with experience and is then interpreted and transformed into usable principles. In other words, traditional learning methods start with the “head”, or knowledge, and expect that knowledge to work itself out to the “hands” or application/experience. Team initiatives operate with the belief that learning is more effectively caught rather than taught. Learning starts with the “hands” (team initiatives) and goes more quickly to the “head” as principles for longer lasting impact and deeper transformation for the individual and the company.