Active-Listening Exercises for Team Building

by Mary Tucker-McLaughlin

Team building promotes problem solving, efficiency and reliability. Listening is a critical communication skill and involves much more than the act of just hearing what someone says. Team members who do not know how to actively listen to feedback from other team members can potentially ruin the progress and productivity of a team. Active listening involves both verbal and nonverbal acknowledgments of what the speaker is saying.

"Listening with Your Body" Team Building Exercise

The "Freeze Walk" exercise involves the entire group and helps to hone nonverbal listening skills. Instruct everyone in the group to stand up and begin milling around the room. Tell players that someone must then freeze. The other players must follow by freezing as soon as they can. When everyone is frozen, one person begins to mill around again. The other players must follow suit as quickly as possible. The goal of the exercise is for team members to be acutely cognizant of their fellow team members' body movements. Observation of body movement is an important skill in active listening.

Concentration Focus Team Building Exercise

Learning to completely focus on what the speaker is saying is another active-listening technique, one that is more difficult to master in this age of Blackberrys and iPhones. In this exercise called countdown, you can involve a group as large as 14 people. Instruct players to stand in a circle with their arms around each other's shoulders. One person will start to count and then another must follow and so on. No one is allowed to overlap or repeat a number in order to succeed in the game. This teaches team members to fully listen to their teammates without interrupting.

Paraphrasing and Confirmation Team Buliding Exercise

Paraphrasing involves repeating what the speaker has said to you in order to gain confirmation. In the "story line" exercise, five members stand in a group. The leader asks for the title of the story from the audience. The game begins when the first person gives the first few lines of the story. The person sitting next to him must continue the story when the leader points to her. if she does not repeat the lines exactly as her teammate has spoken them, the leader calls her "out" and she must sit down. The story is complete when all five members have had an opportunity to repeat their team members' story additions and add their own. The leader can call a member out if what he is adding does not make sense or he incorrectly tells his teammates part of the story.


In business, active listening can help avoid costly errors and even save lives. Leadership, teams, customer relationships and negotiation all depend on employees' abilities to actively listen both to teammates and customers. If you are truly tuned in to a speaker and practicing active listening, you should be tired at the end of the conversation. Active listening improves with experience and should be practiced every day, both in the business environment and at home. Incorporating active listening exercises into team building is an excellent way to teach employees about the importance of active listening and to show them ways to improve their active listening skills.

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