subject: Why Cooking Is Such A Great Team Building Exercise [print this page] Team building has always been an important exercise for corporate groups. It is an activity that not only allows a team to build relationships, improve their ability to work as a part of a team, but also to aid their development as a functioning unit, creating team spirit by working towards a shared goal.
Team building exercises range from outdoor events, such as assault courses, Its a knockout style challenges and treasure hunts to less physical indoor activities such as art and design, drumming courses. But often, these activities are either far too active for the arty-types, or too arty for the office athletes.
If you are looking for something slightly different to the usual meal out or night out in a bar / club, why not allow your attendees to prepare their own dinner in the form of a cookery course?
The best team building exercises are ones that allow team-members to work together to demonstrate their ability to plan, solve problems and discover how the rest of their colleagues think and behave in a non-working environment. Cookery allows them to do all of this and more.
Traditionally cooking has been a great exercise to bring families together as it is often been said that the family that eats together, stays together. This is because cookery is a great way for people to work together as a unit, as there are a lot of individual tasks that need to come together in order to create the perfect dish.
Cookery also helps delegates improve their communication skills, as they will need to communicate well with every member of the team, to ensure that all of the components of the dish come together correctly and at the right time.
Most importantly cooking is also fun, it is a great day out where professionals can take off their work hats, spend the day learning new skills and really get to know their colleagues in a non-working environment.
Today there are many specialist cookery schools that are purpose built to accommodate team building days. They are set up to entertain a large number of delegates, separated into teams, to learn new skills from qualified chefs and work together as a team to recreate the dish that they have been taught or work with the chefs to plan and create their own menus.
Types of activities you can expect to do on a typical day out include demonstrations on how to cook certain dishes or food types such as canapes or sushi for example to full on master chef style, team competitions where delegates compete against each other for a prize.
