Catchy Topics for Team-Building Presentations

When you are doing a presentation on teamwork, it can be hard to find a winning angle that will get people's attention. After all, the topic of team building is pretty broad and also a little boring on its own since most people already know what teamwork is and understand that it can be a good thing.

That is why you might want to consider some team-building presentation ideas that focus on one specific aspect of team building, such as reasons for working as a team or methods of team building, or consider ideas that illustrate how team building can make or break a project, which could even focus on examples of great or poor teamwork in pop culture or in music history.

Generally speaking, people know that teamwork is good, but giving them reasons detailing why team building is so vital to the timely and efficient completion of a project can still open their eyes to just how important it is to work together. Remind them that teamwork increases productivity, improves creativity and problem solving, reduces conflict and builds better means of communication. Additionally, it can help them network and improve their careers and can be fun too.

If you want, you could even focus on one specific benefit of teamwork, such as reduced conflicts in a group. Alternatively, you may want to zero in on how improved teamwork can actually help individuals themselves, focusing on how networking, increased productivity, improved problem solving and other benefits can help people who might otherwise resist working on a team together.

Successful teamwork can only be achieved if the team is effective in communication, delegation, efficiency, conflict resolution, creativity and support for one another. While you can easily do a presentation discussing how these aspects are all necessary for creating a strong team, you can also focus on any of these as good team-building topics for employees.

For example, if you know that the group to which you are presenting is good with communication and creativity, you might emphasize how improved delegation can help a team like theirs to better achieve their goals.

Your audience may already understand that team building is important, and they may know what values are important in building a strong team, but they might not know how to actually go about team building for themselves. That is why a specific plan instructing your listeners on how to strengthen their teams might be a winning topic for your presentation. While there are many guides for doing this, Dr. Carter McNambra's 18-point guide to building highly effective teams is an excellent resource, and this information is readily available online.

Dr. McNambra suggests starting by setting clear goals, establishing clear objectives to measure effectiveness, defining how to create clear communication between team members, establishing a procedure for making decisions, developing staffing procedures, determining membership of the group, establishing time frames for establishing and dissolving the group (if applicable), figuring out the membership of a team and assigning the roles of leader and communicator.

Next, you will need to start work on the project by identifying your resource needs, developing a budget, clarifying the specifics of the project to each group member, planning team-building activities to unify your group and planning the initial team meeting. As the project progresses, you will need to regularly monitor and report on the status of the team, support team meetings and celebrate accomplishments by team members.

Depending on the type of presentation you are giving, you could always work in team-building exercises, or if you are talking to a group of leaders, you can describe some effective team-building techniques that they can use to make a stronger team. While it is fine to use popular exercises about which many people have already heard, try to stay away from those that are simply cliche, like trust falls, or that have questionable value as a training tool, like tug-of-war.

If you are looking for some ideas for exercises that operate as team-building topics for employees to work better together, the human knot is a popular activity that requires teamwork and a few people to step in with leadership. This exercise works by having everyone hold hands with different people across the circle and then straightening out the circle without anyone letting go of one another's hands.

Alternatively, the minefield is a team-building exercise that focuses on communication and leadership skills by asking someone to guide another person through a "minefield" made with obstacles like napkins by using only words such as "forward, back, left and right." You can easily find more exercises like these online that can serve as team-building topics for workplaces.

This is a fun way to stress the importance of understanding strengths and assigning proper roles when working as a group. First, make up a simple project that would best be performed by people with specific tasks. For example, formulate a simple LEGO design, set bricks out on a table that can be used to make that design and then ask for three random volunteers. Next, ask for specific people to volunteer, starting with a manager, an engineer and a customer service person or salesperson.

Tell everyone that one person from each group will sit at a table and be the only one able to look at the plans for the design, one person will be at the table to build the LEGO creation, but she will be unable to look at the plans, and the third person from each group will be required to go between the two tables to relay what the builder is building and what the person with the plans says she will need to do in order to complete the design.

Now, randomly assign the first group of three volunteers but then assign the manager to be at the table with the plans, the engineer to build the design and the customer service or salesperson to work as the runner communicating between the two tables. Inevitably, the group whose roles were assigned based on their skill sets will finish first. You can then use this fact to illustrate to the rest of the audience why it is so important that people in a group are properly assigned to the right tasks given their strengths and experience.

Some people are used to working alone, especially people in certain positions or industries that don't tend to rely on teamwork. Unfortunately, when you need them to work in a group, they question the purpose of the team. This is why it can sometimes be a good idea to put your focus on an industry-specific teamwork topic for the presentation.

For example, it is easy to imagine why a medical team needs to work well together, but it can be a lot harder to convince a bunch of accountants why they need to improve their teamwork. However, by showing a monthly report sample that envisions contributions from each person's specific area of expertise, the group might better understand why they need to work on their team-building skills.

People love movies and TV shows, so by pointing out how fictional characters operate better after focusing on team building, it can help illustrate your point in an interesting way to which everyone can relate. Of course, this does mean that you will need to pick a franchise to which the majority of your employees will relate.

This means that you can't pick something you love that the majority of people have not watched, like "Dexter" or "Four Weddings and a Funeral." Instead, focus on franchises with which people of all ages and genders will be at least somewhat familiar, even if they have not actually seen it. For example, you could do something on how better conflict-resolution skills could have helped to prevent the division of the avengers in "Captain America: Civil War" or how the only way that the rebels can be successful in "Star Wars" is through working as a coordinated team.

Keep your audience in mind and try to avoid spoilers that are not common knowledge as well. While a Harry Potter presentation would be fine if most of your co-workers are millennials, if they are mostly baby boomers, they might not be as familiar with the topic. Likewise, while a mostly male group might be familiar with "John Wick," many female co-workers would not be as familiar. As for spoilers, you can generally assume that anything older than 10 years is safe, but be careful about revealing spoilers, even if it seems like everyone has already seen it.

Yes, musical taste tends to be even more diverse than people's movie and TV show preferences – the person who loves Metallica will think that Taylor Swift is the worst sounding thing on Earth and vice versa. That being said, bands can make for great examples of teams, and most people will understand what you are talking about, even if they don't listen to rock music.

You can talk about how a band needs to have the right balance with its members, pointing out that a band with five drummers probably is not going to be able to make music as great as a band with one drummer, a bassist, a lead guitarist, a rhythm guitarist and a singer. You can explain how a band like the Beatles was only able to perform together effectively as long as they had good communication and that after poor communication dissolved their relationships, they broke up.

You may also talk about failed so-called "supergroups" and focus on the fact that when people are unwilling to get out of their own comfort zones or when they let their egos take over so they can't compromise, you are going to end up with something mediocre no matter how talented the individual members of the group may be. A great example of this is SuperHeavy, a group few people have even heard of despite the fact that it contained Mick Jagger, Damian Marley, Joss Stone, Dave Stewart of Eurythmics and, oddly, A.R. Rahman, the singer-composer best known for working on "Slumdog Millionaire." While each of those people is unarguably very talented, the end result of their collaboration is mediocre, chaotic and forgettable.