Team Building
Team building workshops with enough horse power to make an impact.
Advali Lead provide unique learning and bonding opportunities for your team with our Team Building workshop.
The workshop covers four key areas — communication, team building, relationship building, and understanding strengths — to help enhance your team’s emotional intelligence. Founded on experiential learning, Team Building sessions are fun, insightful, challenging, memorable, and interactive.
So, what makes our workshops unique?
One member of your team is a horse. Literally.
We know what you’re wondering…
Don’t worry; there’s no riding involved.
All workshops are ground-based and everyone is welcome. You don’t need any previous experience with horses — in fact, our workshops are the first time many participants have ever seen a horse up close.
See your team in a new light.
Horses are famously social and intelligent. As excellent communicators, they can instinctively read people and emotions — they’re always honest, authentic, and in the present moment. To get science-y, horses are the ideal co-facilitator for initiating change and development within team dynamics because they don’t have a frontal cortex. This means they’re incapable of separating their feelings from their behaviour.
Your hoofed team member will decipher the dynamics of your team and provide immediate feedback, so you know what’s working and what isn’t. As a result, team will quickly develop self-awareness, be present, honest and committed whilst experientially learning about what makes the team tick.
COMMUNICATION
First up, your team will take on exercises that gauge how effective they are at verbal and nonverbal communication. Horses innately sense and respond to emotions — poor communication means your horse won’t respond to you, trust you, or look to you for leadership or safety. If there is mixed communication, the horse won’t respond until there is clear communication and the team is in sync. As such, horses assist in demonstrating the consequences of poor communication, emotion-driven behaviour and erratic decision-making.
TEAM BUILDING
Of course, the entire workshop is about “team building”, but there’s a session for just that as well. Building on session one, participants get feedback on how they work as team by undertaking specific activities. These activities are designed to identify leaders, dominant individuals, communication gaps or breakdowns, as well as the team’s ability to problem-solve and think-outside-the-box. All are important elements for managers to understand so they can help improve their team's effectiveness and cohesiveness back at the workplace.
RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
Healthy relationships within the workplace play a huge role in overall workplace culture. Here, your horse gives more feedback on team dynamics. In these exercises, your team need to build trust and transparency with each other (if they don’t already have it), quickly learning to adopt a healthy level of professional co-dependency. Relying on others is an essential part of teamwork. As a manager, you’ll be able to see which members of your team struggle to let go of the “lone-wolf” approach or build rapport in a new environment.
UNDERSTANDING STRENGTHS
Exercises here will make people shine in different areas. Your horse will help you identify individual strengths of the people within your team, as well as your team’s collective strengths — some of which you may have never noticed before. Areas to work on will also be highlighted, but the real focus is pinpointing how you can utilise your team’s strengths in your daily operations. We often see strengths like leadership, problem-solving, empathy, logical thinking, creativity, and more, revealed.
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Practical stuff
Facilitated by a Horse Specialist, each Team Building workshop takes place in a relaxing outdoor environment. The workshop runs for half a day and covers four key team dynamics — communication, teamwork, relationships, and strengths. Each is explored over a different activity-based session within the workshop. There’s also a catered break halfway through the session.
Book your Team Building session!
Our sessions are conveniently located on Advali Farm, just a 35-minute drive south of the city. If you’re chomping at the bit and keen to learn more about this hands-on workshop or book one for your team, contact us.