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Enhance your next corporate retreat with Summit Team Building’s Team Building Scavenger App, now available at Blue Mountain, Niagara Falls, and Niagara-on-the-Lake. This interactive tool adds excitement to our signature programs, guiding teams through location-based challenges, problem-solving tasks, and creative team initiatives. Strengthen collaboration, boost engagement, and experience unforgettable team-building adventures. Learn more about how our app can elevate your event!

About the Event: The Adventure Continues! Summit’s Scott Kress will be speaking at the 2024 Elora Adventure Film Festival (EAFF). […]

Discover the parallels between leadership in extreme expeditions and in corporate settings, as discussed by explorer Robert Swan.

Discover the parallels between leadership in extreme expeditions and in corporate settings, as discussed by mountaineer Ryan Waters.

Use these guidelines, ideas & charity team building activities at your conference or company offsite event. Add fun into your fundraising.

A charity team building challenge has become a must do for an organization when at a conference. Not only does this type of program accomplish the ever important team building element, but it also adds in a feel good component.

Many organizations have a mandate to be charitable and it is often stated in their company values. Your company can combine team building and giving back at the same time. What better way to grow as a team, feel good about who you are, and serve your company values at the same time.

In this post, Laurie Warkentin provides some key insights on the importance of emotional intelligence (EI) training. She covers making the case for training, touches on what the 5 main EI competency areas are, and why an EI training workshop might be a good choice for your organization.

If you were to make a list of all the things that impact you, what kinds of things would be on that list? Think about all the things that you are concerned about and that directly or indirectly have an impact on you

What�s on your list? The environment? Your job? The rise in the cost of living?

In this team building post, Mary Barry discusses the team building assessment tools we use in our workshops. She covers what they do, how they are different and key things to consider when choosing one to use for your team. 

The primary assessment tools we use, that are designed for individuals, are Myers-Briggs (MBTI) for personality types identification; Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI), which is based on a relationship awareness theory; and EI 2.0 for emotional intelligence. 

We also use the 5 Dysfunctions of a team. It is the only assessment we do that does a breakdown of the team vs individuals and is one of my favourites.

All of them are designed to improve leadership skills, team dynamics and understanding the strengths and the potential opportunities that you have on your team to improve relationships. 

These tools are used  to improve team performance and team relationships which we believe is the foundation to high performance. 

Recently Summit Team Building President Scott Kress sat down with Shaun Francis, CEO of Medcan for the Eat Move Think podcast. �Eat Move Think� is a great podcast for anyone that leads, manages or is responsible for the development of high performance teams.

The podcast How to Build High Performance Teams, Shaun and Scott covered everything from the origins of team building to where it is today and a whole bunch of interesting information in between, including how leadership disproportionately impacts team culture. The popular show Ted Lasso makes a great example of leadership impacting team culture.

Team building has always been important, and now more so than ever. Teams are experiencing unprecedented change, challenge and stress and if we want them to continue to perform, we need to provide them with the support they need.

We hope you enjoy listening to this podcast as much as Shaun and Scott did making it.

Shaun Francis is the CEO of Medcan, a Toronto based healthcare provider. Shaun knows the importance of teams and walks the talk. For close to 20 years now Summit has been engaged with Medcan to deliver a 1-day training/team building program called the Values session. This program is for all new hires and helps them to learn and understand the values and culture at Medcan.

Northbound Sales Training delivers a live instructor-led online program, �Goal Aligned� Selling�. This 8-module course will give you the skills & strategies to succeed in this tough selling environment. 

You can experience the program from anywhere and learn in short, bite-sized sessions – the best way for people to learn!

If you’re a sales manager, this is a perfect way to develop solid foundational selling skills for a select few members of your team!

We all know the world of selling was turned on its head last year and most salespeople are still facing an uphill climb to get back to pre-COVID levels.  As things open up, you’ll need to equip yourself with sharper selling skills to capitalize on every sales opportunity. 

In the first 3 parts of this series on the future of team building, in part 1 we have examined what team building is and a brief historical review. In part 2 we examined the world of Virtual Team Building and in part 3 we looked at In-Person Team Building. For this final post in this series, we will take a look at the complex world of hybrid team building which incorporates both in-person and virtual elements.

In the first two installments of this series we examined what team building is, where it came from, and what […]

In the first installment of this series, we explored the definition of team building as well as offering some historical […]

What is the definition of team building? Ultimately the goal is to create a workplace that provides team members with a fulfilling and supportive environment and has high productivity results. How is this achieved? It can be an organic evolution as a group of people come together, connect effectively, and produce above average results. The challenge with relying on the organic approach is that sometimes it happens and sometimes it does not. To provide a higher likelihood of achieving a positive team culture and superior results we turn to team building.

It has been 16 months since we have had an in person meeting with a client let alone delivered an in person team building program.

During this time, we have pivoted and created many great virtual programs to help keep our clients focused, learning and growing. These virtual programs have been great, but we do miss the personal connections made during an in person meeting, workshops and events.

We are encouraged to say that there seems to be a shift in the team building, event, and meeting world and in society in general.

In fact, in a smart and safe way, having an in person meeting for small teams is starting to happen again!

Yet, Planning an in person meeting today involves things you’d never have though of doing before the pandemic. Here are some things to consider.

Today we are announcing a new virtual leadership development program featuring the Lunch and Learn Leadership Development Series(ideal for individuals) […]

What advice can you give us on how to improve virtual meetings? This is a key question we get during our preview events and when planning virtual team building programs for the groups we work with. Let�s start with the problem.

We have all experienced virtual team meetings that are quite passive and therefore disengaging. There are some good reasons and screen habits completely beyond how we run our virtual meetings that contribute to virtual disengagement and the dreaded Zoom fatigue.

We often speak with the person or small group of people that have been tasked with organizing the agendas for their organization�s event, and we wanted to provide this quick reference guide on some of what we see to be fantastic snack box options to hopefully ease some of your research.

Snack boxes are a great companion to a virtual team building or training program, and in some cases can provide materials needed for a program (such as juggling balls for The Juggling Act team building program or a healthy, high performance snack companion for a High-Performance Team workshop).

Below is a comparison of a few of our favourite options right here in Canada and our neighbour in the USA.

Around the globe, more and more teams and organizations have shifted or adapted to a hybrid if not fully virtual workforce over the past year. There are many benefits to remote work such as the added flexibility, but with that flexibility comes different virtual team challenges, both in our personal lives (separating work from home as an example) and in our work teams.

Building and maintaining strong virtual teams present different and sometimes additional challenges than teams that are together in person.

Building high performance virtual teams requires virtual team building as a critical part to facilitating connection, engagement, collaboration, and relationship building. AND�.we have a good idea of what your pushback or concern might be.

For many people, work lives take place on a screen and virtual meetings are on a gallery view grid. We�ve likely all been in online meetings where one person is talking the whole time and continuously sharing their screen. Be honest, where was your attention? Were you fully engaged?

Passivity, disengagement, and exhaustion are our virtual reality at work as we remain in the same chair, eyes looking at the same screen, with our mute buttons on. When people talk about Zoom burnout, I think what they mean is bad Zoom meetings are exhausting. And they are!

But your virtual meeting does not have to be this way! You can foster a higher level of engagement and connection virtually, but first we need to understand our engrained relationships to our screens and how to change it in order to create engaging virtual meetings.

The right DIY virtual icebreakers get your online meetings & team building activities off to a great start. Which are the right ones though?

If you are looking for DIY ideas for virtual icebreakers (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, WebEx etc.) for your next team meeting, a quick google search might turn up 7 million ideas. There are so many virtual icebreakers lists out there, it can be overwhelming just sifting through them.
Which icebreakers work? Which ones are fun? Which ones are lame? Which ones make sense for your particular team or group? Which meet your objectives?

These are all questions you might want to consider before leading an icebreaker, and it could take some time reading through many lists to find some that will work for your team.

The workplace as we knew it changed drastically and rapidly in 2020. For most people, 2021 is a welcome change in the calendar as 2020 was a challenging year in so many ways. We anticipate all the ways in which our world was transformed so rapidly will have long lasting impacts in our lives and workplaces well into this new year and beyond.

The dawn of a new year is an invitation to pause, look back, and reflect on what has worked and what has not worked and press the reset button. Pressing reset is not a way to erase this past year, although I know many might want to! Instead, reset is a way to be reflective and intentional about taking forward what is working and leaving behind what is not working

In the 20-ish years that we have been designing and delivering team and leadership development programs we have been pleased to notice the increase in requests we get to incorporate a way to give back to the local or even global community while at the same time offering an experience that unites teams and builds relationships.

Our first involvement with a non-profit organization has proven to have staying power. In 2009 we delivered our first in person �Play it Forward� program which partners with a fantastic organization called Kiva.

We do not have to go far to find someone who is experiencing a decrease in their mental health since the pandemic began. We are not alone in our struggle. The World Health Organization�s (WHO) recent survey of 130 countries states that in 93% of countries worldwide, since the pandemic began the demand for mental health is increasing and yet access and underfunding of mental health supports is lagging or has been disrupted.

If you find yourself feeling exhausted due to workplace burnout, you are not alone. Perhaps you experience some, all, or many of the following; long hours trying to and work/parent/live in the same space, political or economic uncertainty, pandemic related health concerns (could be physical or emotional), feeling isolated, and so many more. Some days it can feel hard separating home life from work life.

In a previous post about resilience training we talked about embracing the process of learning. Leaning into the process of learning is uncomfortable because we are developing and �working out� new parts of our brain which builds new neural pathways.

Accepting and embracing being uncomfortable as part of the learning process grows our resilience because naturally we are prone to avoid unease and uncomfortable feelings.

“Reduced social interaction, increased workloads, and lack of well-being and mental health supports” contribute to half (49%) of the workforce looking to quit their job despite the global uncertainty according to the Hays Canada survey. The article suggests even something as simple as regularly talking with our employees and asking how they are doing is a good start to showing our teams that we care about their well-being.

Covid has been hard on us all. Our lives have been changed in so many ways. Some good and some […]

We put together a compilation of recent articles, on core values, that we find to be relevant to organizations, leadership, […]

Sources of Conflict in the Workplace Conflict in organizations and teams can be the result of many different sources, including […]

How Perspective Impacts the Workforce and Back to School It�s the last day in August, and here in Canada, most […]

Big Rock Thinking and Action More Important Than Ever Without applying successful habits and tools like Stephen Covey’s 4 Quadrants […]

Global HR Trends from 10,000 HR Professionals In 2019, Deloitte � one of the largest professional service organizations in the […]

We rounded up a few of the best articles we read in July 2020 that we think summarize the flexibility, […]

The Leaders Toolkit Includes Cognition How we as leaders handle the cognitive parts of our work responsibilities matters. To obtain […]

Workplace Relationships, Professional Development and Trust Strong and connected workplace relationships is the foundation to our professional development. In business […]

June 2020 was a month of change fatigue and calls for change. The ongoing impacts of Covid-19 that have ushered […]

The Zoom virtual meeting has become the go to meeting platform for 2020 and will continue to be used even after the work at home requirements of Covid-19 have passed. Many workers will not return to the office and many companies are seeing the benefit of a remote workforce. Therefore, the online meeting will become a norm and may even overtake the in-person meeting as the go to meeting platform.

For many of us, life changed in mid-March. Remote work became the norm and team meetings, off site events, conferences […]

Many of us are working from home and for the foreseeable future. How will remote work impact us personally and the culture of our company?

The Coronavirus is changing the way were work and whether remote work will become a widely-accepted norm in organizations in the future.