Kurt Blazek

High-performing teams don’t just happen. They require cultivation. The right people with the right skills, the right habits, good communication. And trust. Trust is one of the most important components to a well-functioning team. One way to grow it is through team-building exercises.

For some, the mere mention of team-building exercises elicits groans, eye rolls, and pessimism. But team-building exercises don’t have to be the same tired old ice-breakers, trust falls, or role-playing games. There are many different avenues to build trust—often at off-site venues. Here are a few ideas.

Just a small amount of poison can make an entire lake toxic, and the same can be true when it comes to negativity in the workplace. You might have experienced this in your own office—one pessimist, one whiner, one complainer, or one troublemaker can infect the attitudes of an entire team or even department. And, because those behaviors are often perceived as inherent and unalterable personality traits, they go unchecked. But that’s an assumption that can have damaging results, including declining morale, decreased productivity, disengagement, and ultimately, turnover. It’s best to determine a solution to the behavior as soon as possible.

AMC’s popular series Mad Men started its final season this past weekend and although fictional, depicts some of the realities around a lack of diversification in the workplace during the 1960s. The agency is led and largely staffed by Caucasian men; the few women (also Caucasian) in the office are generally part of the typing pool or some other lower-level (read: nonparticipatory) position. Although fictional, the agency portrayed is actually pretty spot-on when it comes to how business was run half a century ago. And while we might be able to say that in the intervening 50+ years we’ve vastly progressed as a country in terms of diversifying the workplace, we still have some work to do, particularly when it comes to company leadership—according to a report done by McKinsey & Company, companies with greater diversity in their leadership rankings were more likely to be in the top quartile in terms of financial performance.

You got that promotion you’ve been gunning for—which means that someone was impressed by how you performed in your previous role. But it doesn’t mean that you get to just sit back on your laurels and enjoy the fatter paycheck. Instead, it means you now are beginning the work of transitioning from one role you did well to a new role that most likely requires new skills. And it probably means that now you’re supervising the people who were recently your peers. Here are some tips to help make your transition as smooth as possible.