Professor of Team Building, Pablo Martínez implements the Basketball experience in the International MBA

Since 2005, Pablo Martínez, ex professional basketball player from Estudiantes Madrid, has been developing a team building activity with the International MBA programme. In 2009 it was included for the first time within the “Launch programme”, (mentioned previously in this blog).

For two hours students trained in the basketball court, trying to connect the basketball experience with their Master programme. Every student tried to develop their own abilities whilst at the same time being part of a team with the common goal of building an effective team.

After the exercises on court, a 90 minute debrief was provided by the facilitators, in order to give the students the chance to reflect on the activity and try to translate it into a methodological approach for working in high performance teams.

As some of the students mentioned: “We only knew the colleagues’ names. This was really the first time we worked together. It was impressive how we discovered in a single hour the team improvement on the court. This worked due to collaboration between each other.”

For Pablo Martínez this really shows that Michael Jordan was right with the phrase”basketball is a tool that teaches”.