Team Building Lessons From The Hare and The Tortoise

Let us take the age-old story of the story of the Hare and the Tortoise and look at what lessons it has to offer in the 21^st century mantra of ‘enhancing corporate team building’. I am a storyteller and I took some liberties to create situations other than the one that we are familiar with in this story to use analogy to remember some core team building principles.

After the Hare and the Tortoise had run the infamous race, the Hare did some introspection and realised that its overconfidence was the reason for its failure. It challenged the tortoise to another race. This time the Hare was very diligent and easily won the race.

The learning - while it is good to be slow and steady, in organisations it is the fast and steady who are successful.

The story does not end here….

The tortoise did some introspection and realised that it would never be able to win the race in the way it is now designed. So it challenged the hare to a different type of race. The hare agreed. In this race the Hare sped over the Tortoise on land but as the second part of the race it had to cross a river to reach the goal post. The Hare was not able to do so and the Tortoise ended up winning the race.

The learning - we all have our core competencies and we have to create opportunities that help us capitalise our core competencies.

The story does not end here…

The Hare and the Tortoise had become good friends by now and they introspected on ways to create a win-win situation. As per the new plan, the hare carried the tortoise over land and while crossing the river the tortoise carried the Hare on its back. Both the Hare and the Tortoise won the race!

The learning - they realised that though they may have their own competencies, it is the ability to leverage off of various competencies that create powerful teamwork.

"Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much." --Helen Keller

Team Building Training, which focuses on activities to download learning, has been shown to have great impact on the performance of teams. All leaders will uniformly agree that teambuilding gets the greatest attention in business today.

MMM Training Solutions conducts Soft Skills Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.