Can Team Building Events Actually Predict Your Next Leader?

Why Most People Groan At The Mention of Team Building Events 

Traditional team building events follow a predictable script: trust falls, icebreakers, and activities that make half your team internally groan. Yet despite the collective eye-rolling, Perth companies continue to search for the best versions of these experiences because they recognise something fundamental; teams that work well together drive better business outcomes.

But what if the problem isn't team building itself, but how we've been approaching it?

After facilitating countless team building events across Perth, I've discovered something fascinating: the most revealing moments of leadership potential don't emerge during carefully crafted leadership exercises. They surface when people are thrown into unpredictable, high-stakes scenarios where their natural instincts take over.

Traditional team building activities often reinforce existing workplace hierarchies. The confident extrovert dominates the trust exercise, the analytical thinker solves the puzzle, and the quiet team member stays quiet. Everyone plays their expected role, and genuine leadership potential remains hidden beneath layers of workplace conditioning.

Real leadership, the kind that emerges during crises, drives innovation, and builds psychological safety, reveals itself when people are placed in situations that disrupt their normal patterns. When status barriers dissolve and everyone starts from equal footing. When the stakes feel real, but the consequences are contained.

This is why social deduction games and murder mystery team building events have become our specialty at Folklore. Not because they're trendy or different, but because they create the precise psychological conditions where authentic leadership behaviors emerge. When your team is hunting a monster in a medieval village or unraveling conspiracies at a 1920s Hollywood party, something remarkable happens: people stop performing their job titles and start performing as themselves.

Why Social Deduction Games Outperform Traditional Team Building

What are Folklore Murder Mystery Events?

Murder mystery team building events aren’t your grandmother's dinner party game with scripted characters and predetermined outcomes. Modern murder mystery events, particularly social deduction games like Folklore’s Monster Hunt and Hollywood Masquerade experiences, are sophisticated psychological environments designed to surface authentic team dynamics.

In these events, participants receive secret roles with hidden motivations, special abilities, and conflicting information. Some players are good, attempting to work together to solve the mystery and vote out the killer. Others are evil, secretly working to sabotage the group while maintaining their innocent facade. Most importantly, no one knows who they can trust.

The brilliance lies in the uncertainty. Unlike traditional team building where everyone knows they're on the same side, murder mystery events create genuine information asymmetry. Players must read social cues, evaluate conflicting stories, and make critical decisions with incomplete information—precisely the skills leaders need in complex workplace situations.

This isn’t a case of participants sitting on the outside of a roleplay situation looking in, confidently observing a situation and stating objectively what they would do under the same conditions. It's an immersive experience that's so engaging and consuming that it actually allows real behavioural insights to emerge.

Play Based Learning Making Art Imitate Work

What makes murder mystery team building particularly powerful is its participatory structure. There are no observers, no bench-warmers, and no opportunities to fade into the background. Every player holds crucial information that could determine the group's success or failure.

The games unfold in alternating phases: private "quest" periods where players use special abilities and gather information, followed by public "town halls" where everyone shares what they've learned, debates theories, and votes on critical decisions. This rhythm mirrors real workplace dynamics—periods of individual work followed by collaborative decision-making.

The psychological pressure is intentional and productive. When you're accused of being the monster, you must defend yourself convincingly. When you're a villager with crucial evidence, you must communicate clearly under time pressure. These aren't arbitrary skills—they're the communication and persuasion abilities that leaders use daily.

Most importantly, the games create what Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson calls "psychological safety"—the belief that you can speak up, take risks, and even fail without negative consequences. Because everyone expects deception and misdirection, the normal social penalties for being wrong are suspended.

A quirk of the social contract in play during murder mysteries allows players to gather insights into the nature of truth and deception unavailable to them almost anywhere else. Players agree to lie to one another, knowing there is no situation in which their lies won’t be exposed. In other words, participants willingly agree to show each other what it looks like when they lie. When combined with facilitated reflection this allows players from both sides to actively explore the kinds of manipulative or destructive behaviours that are most effective against them, and how to better recognise them in the future.

Can Team Building Events Genuinely Test Leadership Skills?

Traditional team building activities often suffer from what we call “performance bias”, in other words, people behave as they think they should rather than as they naturally would. Murder mystery events eliminate this problem through role disruption, emotional investment, and high-engagement scenarios.

When someone plays the Assassin in Monster Hunt, they might choose to be diplomatic and let the group decide how they use their ability, or they might be decisive and choose unilaterally. When they're the Medium, they might reveal unexpected analytical skills. When they're forced to be the Monster, they might surprise everyone (including themselves) with their strategic thinking and persuasive abilities.

The stakes feel real because the social dynamics are real. Getting voted out stings a little. Successfully convincing the group to trust you feels genuinely satisfying and winning on either team is a thrill worthy of the emotional labour it requires. These authentic emotional responses create genuine learning moments that transfer into workplace situations.

Unlike trust falls or communication exercises, social deduction games and murder mystery events test skills that leaders actually need: reading room dynamics, managing conflicting priorities, communicating under pressure, building coalitions, and maintaining credibility when the stakes are high. The learning isn't theoretical, it's experiential, the feedback is instant and immediately applicable.

Revealing Hidden Leadership Potential through Engagement

How High-Pressure Problem Solving Reveals Natural Leaders

Leadership often emerges not during calm strategic planning sessions, but in moments of crisis when traditional approaches fail. Murder mystery events excel at creating these moments artificially, allowing teams to observe how different members respond when conventional solutions don't work.

During a recent Monster Hunt event with a Perth software development company, we watched a typically quiet junior developer transform into the group's strategic coordinator. When the team's initial approach of sharing all information openly resulted in chaos and conflicting theories, she stepped up and facilitated a more systematic information-gathering framework. Not only eliciting information, but working with more trusted allies to test and verify that information. As Ray Dalio would say, she believed believable people and triangulated her data until the stories either matched or broke down. Her methodical approach and clear communication helped the team identify the monster before the final round.

What made this moment significant wasn't just her problem-solving ability. It was her teammates' recognition of a leadership capability they hadn’t witnessed at that level before. Whether she had a background in games that gave her the confidence to speak up in this instance, or Monster Hunt just presented itself to her as a puzzle she was capable of solving, her leadership potential was clear. By the end of the game, colleagues of all levels understood that their best chance to solve the mystery was going through her.

This pattern repeats consistently across our events. Emergent skills reveal themselves - from unexpected creative thinking, to crisis management, and natural mediators, ready to deescalate and find common ground when team conflicts arise.

Social deduction games create what psychologists call "cognitive load"; multiple competing demands that overwhelm standard decision-making processes. Under this pressure, people's authentic leadership styles emerge. Some become natural coordinators, organising information flow and keeping groups focused. Others excel at reading people and identifying deception. Still others prove gifted at building trust and consensus under pressure.

These revelations are valuable precisely because they're unexpected. Traditional leadership assessments and workplace observations tend to confirm existing hierarchies and assumptions. Murder mystery events disrupt these patterns, creating space for emerging leaders to demonstrate capabilities that might otherwise remain hidden.

Encouraging Communication Skills

Effective leadership is fundamentally about communication, not just speaking clearly, but listening actively, reading underlying dynamics, and adapting messaging to different audiences and situations. Murder mystery events test these skills in ways that traditional communication exercises cannot match.

Consider the challenge facing a player who's discovered crucial information about the monster's identity. They must convince skeptical teammates without revealing how they obtained the information (which might expose their own secret role). This requires sophisticated communication skills: building credibility, presenting evidence persuasively, reading audience reactions, and maintaining authenticity while managing hidden agendas.

These communication challenges mirror real workplace leadership scenarios. The executive who must rally support for an unpopular but necessary strategy. The project manager who needs to surface team concerns without creating blame or defensiveness. The team lead who must provide difficult feedback while maintaining relationship trust.

During our Hollywood Masquerade events, we consistently observe players developing more nuanced communication approaches in real-time. They learn to pay attention to micro-expressions and vocal tones. They practice adjusting their message based on audience reactions. They experience the difference between information sharing and persuasive communication.

Building Trust and Cooperation

Perhaps counterintuitively, games involving deception and betrayal often strengthen team trust more effectively than traditional trust-building exercises. This occurs because murder mystery events test trust under realistic conditions rather than artificial ones.

In traditional trust falls, the stakes are entirely physical and the trust required is momentary. In murder mystery events, trust is complex, ongoing, and consequential. Players must decide who to share sensitive information with, whose theories to support, and whose leadership to follow, all while knowing that some teammates are actively working against the group's interests.

This creates opportunities for genuine trust-building moments. When someone correctly identifies the monster despite significant social pressure to believe otherwise, they demonstrate judgment and courage. When a player shares valuable information despite personal risk, they demonstrate commitment to team success. When someone successfully leads the group through complex group decisions, they demonstrate trustworthy leadership.

These trust-building moments feel earned rather than manufactured. They emerge from authentic interactions under pressure rather than structured exercises. Team members witness each other's decision-making processes, communication styles, and priorities in ways that translate directly to workplace collaboration.

Evaluating Team Dynamics When The Stakes Are High

One of the most valuable aspects of murder mystery team building is the opportunity for real-time observation of team dynamics. Unlike traditional exercises where facilitators focus on predetermined learning objectives, murder mystery events reveal authentic interaction patterns that might otherwise remain hidden.

We observe how different team members respond to stress and uncertainty. Some become more directive and decisive. Others become more collaborative and consensus-seeking. Some withdraw and become analytical. Others become more emotionally expressive and persuasive. None of these responses are inherently right or wrong, but understanding them helps teams leverage diverse leadership styles more effectively.

Power dynamics become particularly visible during voting phases. Who influences others' decisions? How are dissenting opinions handled? Do certain voices carry more weight regardless of the strength of their arguments? These observations provide valuable insights into informal leadership structures and communication patterns that impact daily workplace interactions.

We also observe how teams handle information sharing and knowledge management. Some groups develop systematic approaches to gathering and organising information. Others struggle with information overload and competing theories. Some teams excel at building on each other's insights, while others get stuck in individual perspectives.

Perhaps the most fascinating behaviour to observe is how players react when someone’s reasoning doesn’t add up. In Monster Hunt, there is a henchman character called the Poltergeist who is given a good character role at the beginning of the game and believes that they are on the good team. Naturally, this has the potential to cause chaos, because the information they receive is wrong, but they believe it implicitly to be true. They’re bluffing without knowing it, and so players are faced with social reads that don't seem to make sense. This challenges them to interrogate the information independently of the player and verify beyond the appearance of earnestness or believability. 

The beauty of these observations is that they occur naturally within the game structure. Players are focused on winning, not on being evaluated, so their behaviors are authentic rather than performative. This authenticity makes the insights more valuable and actionable for future team development.

Turning Gameplay Insights into Workplace Leadership Skills

The debrief conversation following murder mystery team building events often proves as valuable as the experience itself. Players are typically eager to discuss what happened, share their perspectives, and understand how different team members approached various challenges.

These conversations create opportunities for meta-learning. Learning about how the team learns and works together. Team members can explore questions like: How did we handle conflicting information? What communication patterns helped or hindered our success? When did we trust each other's judgment, and when did we second-guess it?

The game structure provides a shared reference point for discussing normally difficult topics. Instead of abstract conversations about "communication styles," teams can reference specific moments: "When you accused Sarah of being the monster, how did that affect group dynamics?" or "When the time pressure increased, how did our decision-making process change?"

This specificity makes feedback more actionable and less threatening. Team members can experiment with different approaches and discuss the results without the usual workplace consequences of poor communication or failed leadership attempts.

Conclusion: Investing in Team Building for Future Leadership

Murder mystery team building events represent a fundamental shift from traditional approaches that emphasise artificial trust-building toward experiences that reveal authentic leadership potential under realistic conditions. They create psychological safety through structured uncertainty, encourage genuine communication through meaningful stakes, and build trust through earned rather than prescribed interactions.

For Perth organisations serious about developing leadership capability throughout their teams, murder mystery events and social deduction games offer something traditional team building cannot: the opportunity to discover leadership potential in unexpected places and develop it through engaging, memorable experiences that teams will reference and build upon long after the event concludes.

The question isn't whether your team has hidden leadership potential—it's whether you're creating the right conditions to reveal and develop it. Sometimes the best way forward is to embrace a little strategic uncertainty and see who emerges as your natural leaders when the stakes feel real but the environment remains safe.

Ready to discover your team's hidden leadership potential? Contact Folklore to learn more about our murder mystery team building experiences designed specifically for Perth businesses looking to move beyond traditional approaches to team development.