Teambuilding Herding Sheep: Unleash your team & its productivity

when the air burns and the grill glows

The ARD morning show has already taken part in this teambuilding. Teams from VW, ECB, Airbus... have done it. After a short introduction, the team takes charge of up to 1000 sheep and lambs. The destination is a fresh pasture for the animals. Finally you arrive at a beautiful location. The sheep happily pluck the fresh grass, the barbecue is glowing and the cold bottle is popping.

The animals take advantage of every disagreement and dysfunctionality in the team. They don't want to walk to the far away new pasture, but prefer to escape straight away and raid grain fields. Fortunately, the herding dog is there to prevent the worst.

The team learns quickly. It takes a lot of energy to catch the animals again and again. Therefore no one wants to make a mistake a second time. During the breaks the team is undergoing some coaching and is re-organizing itself. They grow together and start to pull together into one direction. After two or three hours of team building, almost every team becomes a high-performance team. Exhausting becomes easy, exerting pressure on the animals and human co-workers becomes real leadership.

The experience of being a high-performance team should become a new habit. What it takes in everyday life for everyone to pull together - that's what the accompanying optional workshop is all about. The factors for the team's success in the 1000 Sheep Challenge are transferred into business life. At the end, there are concrete plans for how to solve conflicts and disagreements, rules for effective cooperation, how to learn together as a team, how to eliminate inhibiting factors and how to achieve the goals for a common future.

Conclusion: A team building with an extreme amount of excitement and fun, where you can learn for life. If you can't lead the sheep, you will also have trouble leading people.

🛑 No animal transport for team building!

Teambuilding with sheep is possible near most major cities. Mostly a travel time of 30-45 minutes is required, because people naturally get out of the city to see the animals.

📺 A summary of the best impressions of the Team Building with Sheep

(the shepherd and his dog let you do it)

💕Happy Customers

Europe’s last Adventure

In this outdoor teambuilding activity, you take over a flock of up to 1000 animals that have not had their breakfast yet. Because a good herding dog replaces 10 shepherds, this looks like child's play with the real shepherd. Your new four-legged friends take advantage of any confusion in the team to break out. This welds everyone in the team together anew. You don't want to run after the fleeing flock a second time. After the second or third break out, the team has become a team that pulls together into one direction. You can almost see how the team is growing together more and more. More pictures and impressions of the teambuilding sheep herding.

We coach for success on the sheep pasture and beyond. If you want to lead people successfully, you should definitely manage the not-so-dumb sheep.

It's all about the pulling together into one direction and setting the right priorities. In short: finding and adjusting the right set of controls for effective cooperation and leadership. Doing the right things right in order to move forward easily.

In the team building with sheep, you experience how to work hard and still not moving on or to move forward intelligently and easily. That's what the optional workshop is for. After analysing the sheep herding with photo and video footage of the team, we move on to transferring it to real life: what can we do differently in the team to get the horsepower onto the road without working even harder (more efficiency!). So that more effort, more time and more stress become ease, progress and a good future together.

"Hape, you're crazy," said one participant when I, as a coach, spoke during the introduction about how you could also learn a lot for life while herding the sheep. When it started, after five minutes he said: "This is just like in our office" (of a global consulting and auditing company).

The leader is particularly important in the outdoor team building with the sheep.

If he or she appears convincing and self-confident, the flock follows almost effortlessly. The leading sheep trust the leader to know where the grass is greener. Then the flock is motivated to follow. If, on the other hand, the leader is too aggressive, the animals are scared away. As flight animals, animals have a seventh sense and can read inner attitudes.

They intuitively sense whether someone is wildly determined or just pretending. They read from the body tension of a herding dog, for example, whether the sheep herding dog has knee pain today and doesn't really want to run or is highly motivated and able to run and bite.

In the same way, they can read determination and concentration or distraction and insecurity in us humans. The animals behave accordingly. Through trial and error, the leaders gain a feeling for the right measure of doing and letting go. This team building is a real adventure and a task in which the team and the leaders grow.

We only do one thing, but this we do really well: team building with animals.