The Benefits of The Hells Bells Team Building Game

1. Interdepartmental Communication

Right from the start of Hells Bells, members from each team are required to share information and work with each other (whether they realise it or not!). To do this successfully, they will not only need to identify participants in other teams who have crucial clues or information that they require for their task, but also be prepared to identify where skills or information that they have at their disposal may be required by others in order to complete a task or set of tasks. As the game progresses, this becomes more and more crucial, and employees from different departments in a company can find themselves sharing and communicating information to move the project forward to conclusion, to a degree that may surprise and delight management!

2. Bonding National Offices

The Hells Bells game is so designed as to generate high levels of energy and activity within and between teams, which very quickly break down barriers that may exist within factions of a workforce and provide instead a risk-free and fun environment for staff to pull together and collaborate whilst working towards a common goal. As hells Bells progresses and the team dynamics start to emerge, there are numerous opportunities to recognise the power of the game in forging working relationships between participants who hitherto may have had no knowledge of each other.

3. Effective Communication, Co-operation and Co-existence

Hells Bells will naturally bring to the fore leaders and would-be leaders, as well as identifying the ‘doers’, the ‘thinkers’ and the ‘butterflies’ (those who flutter around looking busy and try to have a go at everything!) In so doing it will encourage and foster the development of clear and strong communication and teamwork skills, the effectiveness of which will determine how quickly and successfully the various challenges are met, and how well all the different participant profile types manage to mould together under pressure.

Benefits of using Facilitation with Hells Bells

4. Developing Leadership Skills and Management

When Hells Bells is taken with the Facilitation and Feedback option, it is possible to identify ways in which teams could have approached the various tasks differently (and maybe even more successfully!), and the game provides many possibilities for coaching Leadership and Team Management skills, through observation and feedback, to demonstrate areas for skills improvement, which can be effortlessly transferred to the work environment.

5. Understanding and Defining Objectives

Key to the success of any project or work process is the full understanding of the task undertaken, and how that task will move a project or work process forward and closer to it’s objective or successful conclusion. This is as true for major construction or product development projects as it is for simple bread and butter work processes like order taking, despatching, invoicing and collection. In Hells Bells, the plethora of information and data available to the participants can mean that objectives become at best blurred, at worst lost or forgotten! As in the workplace, this can lead to project slippage, business inefficiencies, customer dissatisfaction and team motivation issues. The hells Bells game provides a very powerful environment to demonstrate the importance of keeping focus on clearly defined and understood objectives in order to overcome these problems.

6. Planning and Time Management

Hells Bells tends to follow the classic phases of any group activity, starting with the quiet assimilation or Forming phase that is rapidly followed by the Storming or Headless Chicken phase, during which delegates show a tendency to run about in all directions at once! At some point, sooner or later, a stage is reached when various plans and strategies start to emerge. These provide excellent Learning Points during feedback and evaluation, giving team members the opportunity to reflect to what extent their various approaches to strategic planning and time management contributed to the final successful completion of the project, and what areas for improvement can be developed to reduce the ‘Storming’ phase and drive to the final ‘Performing’ stage of a successful team.

7. Assessing and Utilising Available Resources

All the answers to all the clues and riddles can be found in the material provided. However, as in the workplace, it will be the group that best matches skills to tasks that will move forward successfully. Team members who are capable of identifying skills best suited to a task or set of tasks, and then recognising those skills in others, will find that the tasks proceed to completion much more smoothly than those who fail to recognise and utilise talents in their colleagues. And as with every other aspect of Hells Bells, this ability is supremely important in any work place, where so often employees are called on to use initiative and available resources to overcome pressing work issues.

8. Lateral Thought

Certain aspects of hells Bells are extremely logical, suiting the more rational and analytical ‘left-brained’ team members. However in addition, there are puzzles to challenge the more random, intuitive, creative ‘right-brainers’’ minds, requiring application of cryptic solution and lateral thinking techniques that push people beyond the boundaries of ’the square’, encouraging people to take holistic views of the task in hand and push back on what seems the more logical and obvious path ahead.

9. Changing Old Habits and Embracing Change

With a direct quote from the tome “Who moved my cheese?” the game encourages participants to adopt new ways of working. These may include dealing with work groups and colleagues for the first time, seeing existing colleagues in a new light, and adapting behaviours to ensure the success of the group. For some participants, this may be the most difficult part of the exercise, particularly at first. However because of the high energy levels and fun generated by the activity, invariably participants will discover ways of working together that they would never have dreamed possible.

HELLS BELLS FACILITATOR

Michael R Tierney
MBA, MCMI, M Pract ABNLP,P cert Mgt(Open)
Qualifications:
Certified Master practitioner Neuro Linguistic Programming - American Board of NLP - 2004
Certified Practitioner Neuro Linguistic Programming - American Board of NLP - 2004
Master of Business Administration (MBA) - University of Glasgow - 2002
Member of the Chartered Management Institute - MCMI since 2001
Professional Certificate in Management - Open University 2000
Experience:
Mike has 15 years experience in designing, delivering and facilitating organisational development and training in interventions. He has worked with all levels of organisational hierarchy and in all sectors; from government cabinet ministers to shop floor operatives in small and medium sized manufacturing organisations.
Through insightful observation and an engaging practical approach, Mike's facilitation creates the circumstances which are the catalyst for behavioural change and commitment to improvement at an individual level which result in enhanced business performance with measurable results.

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