By John Buchanan
No one seems certain when it began, but to the extent that a sort of armchair “anthropology” exists on the subject, the origins of modern corporate teambuilding can be traced back to a 1979 book Improving Work Groups: A Practical Manual for Team Building (Wiley, Revised 1992). From that humble beginning, which
An attendee puts the teambuilding lessons learned at The Jump Institute to the ultimate test by tandem skydiving with Jump Institute leader David Hart (on top). Hart applies his high-performance skydiving team’s principles to the workplace.
Photo courtesy of Norman Kent, Teamfastrax.org |
initially manifested in organized exercises such as ropes courses and rock climbing, the notion of transformational training has grown to encompass just about every activity known to man and in every exotic destination on Earth. Along the way, an entrenched polarity has emerged, too — corporate managers tend either to revere teambuilding or revile it. Even among professional practitioners, there are now two schools of thought that are diametrically opposed to one another when it comes to creating something that actually works.
Nevertheless, now more than ever, adherents inject “adventure” into teambuilding to captivate, motivate and educate. But there are also different interpretations of what constitutes an adventure in any given corporate culture.
At casual dining restaurant operator Applebee’s International Inc., for example, the company’s management oversees “a performance-based culture,” according to Tim Sackett, a regional human resources manager
Coaching and listening are keys to success in Teambuilding USA’s 3D Minefield. Blindfolded participants must secure playing cards, which represent new accounts, without getting caught in the live mousetraps.
Photo courtesy of TeamBuildingUSA.com |
based in DeWitt, MI. Sackett plans teambuilding and motivational activities for a half-dozen major meetings a year, and until recently, he focused on teambuilding exercises that forged strong, positive bonds among his 20 multiple-restaurant directors. “We go through a lot of different teambuilding activities,” Sackett said, “whether it’s ropes courses or whatever it might be, but it’s always a full team thing where everybody goes over the wall and we’re helping everybody get there, so no one really feels like they’re the weak link or that they’re on a weak team.”
Last fall, however, Sackett and his top management elected to try something different. They subjected the region’s eight top directors, who had won a contest for best retention rates of their restaurant managers, to the Corporate Sail-Race Challenge created by the Offshore Sailing School in Fort Myers, FL. Offshore Sailing School’s clients include Jet Blue Airways, Ford Motor Company and Cisco Systems.
Sackett said his team learned a powerful new lesson about their real-world working environment — what it’s like to be the weak link.
“We’re used to going into high-stress environments, but we have the skills for it, so we perform pretty well,” said Sackett, who based the group at South Seas Plantation Resort on Captiva Island, FL. “But we’re also trying to develop and coach our people, and we get frustrated sometimes that they don’t react the same
It looked good on paper! Teambuilding options at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, FL, include the Cardboard Boat Regatta, in which teams are challenged to build boats out of cardboard and then race them in Buccaneer Island Lagoon.
Photo courtesy of Ocean Reef Club |
way that we would react. Well, all of a sudden, we’re thrown into the same situation where we don’t have the skill sets, so it was interesting. It was a very unique experience for our top people to be put in a situation where they don’t have the skills and now they feel like the weak player. It was a real epiphany for them.”
Sackett explained how the latest exercise fits into the larger goals of the company. “For us, teambuilding is important because retention is a core goal for Applebee’s,” he said. “When people leave a position, they generally don’t leave because of the company. They leave because of their boss and the people they work with. So, teambuilding is important for us because we know that if we can get our teams to enjoy working with each other, be successful with each other, we’re going to retain them longer.”
Skydiving For Success
At Jasper Engines in Jasper, IN, there is a long history of teambuilding. The company remanufactures automobile engines and transmissions, then sells them to independent garage operators across the country. Typically in the past, Jasper Engines has used teambuilding for entry-level employees and those pursuing leadership roles in the company. Prior activities included ropes courses and wall climbing.
Last summer, Linda Goeppner, director of the human resources department, decided to take a different
If extreme teambuilding and incentives are the goal, Abenteuer Afrika Safari in Namibia, Africa, can oblige. Here, attendees quad-bike down vast sand dunes in ihe Namib Desert. For this part of the adventure, teams stay in a tented camp where they are treated to gourmet dinners.
Photo courtesy of Abenteuer Afrika Safari |
approach. She created a special teambuilding exercise for 12 top managers. “The reason I involved these individuals in this exercise,” she said, “was to give them some ideas they could take back to their staff, as managers.”
She took them to a skydiving-based seminar at Huntingburg Airport in Huntingburg, IN.
Goeppner worked with The Jump Institute, a Cincinnati-based teambuilding provider headed by David Hart, a former U.S. Army Ranger and author of Jump! Leaps in Organizational Performance and Teamwork A Skydiver’s Perspective (Authorhouse, 2005). Hart’s clients include Women in Business, Micro Electronics and a number of Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) chapters around the country.
“It’s a unique approach,” Goeppner said. “It’s the same principles that you’re trying to teach and convey with other teambuilding exercises, but it takes a fresh approach to it. We did that because we wanted to identify a new method of delivering a message about teamwork.”
Hart led the group, based on key principles of competitive team skydiving that he has adapted to business, such as an introduction to skydiving and teamwork, and how the two correlate; a focus on organizational, team and personal vision; performance goals and action plans; teammate selection; high-performance culture, and achieving long-term results.
PRA Destination Management offers a wide variety of teambuilding activities through Out of the Ordinary group adventures. Here, participants compete in Beach Olympics.
Photo courtesy of Out of the Ordinary |
“Then,” explained Goeppner, “he talks about choosing your attitudes and a skydiver’s perspective on attitudes. And he tied that all together, at each step, by pulling small groups together and doing skydiving formations. Then those formations were put together to make a larger formation, until at the end everyone was in one formation. It forced them to listen to each other and work together in a way they never had before.”
No one actually jumped out of an airplane, although that option is available to Jump Institute clients who want to see the concept through to its logical — and very adventurous — conclusion. Instead, said Goeppner, the exercise served as a perfect metaphor for the Jasper Engines management team. “It presented a new approach to teaching teambuilding and the importance of teambuilding,” she said. “It gave our managers further insight into other approaches to building their teams and how to convey the importance of teambuilding to the groups that they lead.”
An entirely different kind of culture exists at Hythiam, a Los Angeles-based marketer of protocols to drug and alcohol treatment centers. Earlier this year, the company held an intensive five-day meeting for 70 members of its clinical site management and business development teams at the Luxe Hotel Sunset Boulevard, in the exclusive enclave of Bel-Air, CA.
Florida’s Universal Orlando Resort offers the Scavenger Challenge, which gives team members the opportunity to scour Universal Studios or Islands of Adventure in search of answers to some of the parks’ hidden secrets.
Photo courtesy of Universal Orlando Resort |
Hythiam had just doubled its sales force, so the meeting represented the first time the key teams that sold its services and implemented them at local clinics around the country could get to know one another in “a goal-oriented environment,” said Eli Kranski, administrative assistant for site management and business development, who planned the teambuilding exercise. He had never created a teambuilding exercise before.
Because of the nature of Hythiam’s business — which Kranski characterizes as “giving people their lives back, giving back to the community, even though we have a profit motive” — Kranski and his management team selected the Build-A-Bike program from Teambuilding USA, with locations in New York, Dallas/Fort Worth, San Diego and Miami. The company’s clients include Proctor & Gamble, Motorola and Starbucks.
Seven 10-person teams built seven bicycles from component parts against a time clock, and then awarded them to underprivileged children from the Boys and Girls Clubs of America who participated in the event. Three facilitators from Teambuilding USA hosted an introductory session and then a post-exercise briefing about what each participant learned from the experience and how it would correlate to their working environment. “So, it wasn’t just this feel-good, happy thing with no connection back to the corporate environment,” said Kranski, who dubbed the program a major success. “We did a lot of other teambuilding and networking type activities during the course of the five-day meeting,” he said, “but this was the most positively received group activity that we had for the entire week. Basically, what everyone said was that it not only got people up out of their chairs and really interacting and excited, but because as a company we’re out there to improve communities and improve families, here was a direct result of that type of mission by working for the Boys and Girls Clubs. They had a direct, immediate reward for the work they were doing.”
Because the exercise also involved coworkers getting to know one another, it provided another benefit, too — fun that had a purpose. “Everyone became 7 years old again,” Kranski said. “It just brought out personalities and it allowed the group to gel together. The way the program is structured, it fosters communication and cooperation.”
Top management from Jasper Engines & Transmissions, Jasper, IN, participated in a skydiving-based seminar at The Jump Institute of Cincinnati, OH, headed by David Hart, a former U.S. Army Ranger. Hart’s seminar is based on key principles of competitive team skydiving that he has adapted to business.
Photo by Linda Goeppner, Jasper Engines & Transmissions |
Yet another application of teambuilding was engineered by Christine Lush, education and training director, front office operations improvement, at healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, CA. Lush oversees a team of 17 trainers who facilitate 12 different education and training programs.
Last fall, Lush took her team to The Mill Rose Inn in Half Moon Bay, CA and led them in a two-day teambuilding retreat designed by Corporate Games of Pleasanton, CA. The company’s clients include Microsoft, American Express and General Electric.
“My intention for this exercise was to create some recognition of each person’s value and to pull together people so they could see things about their coworkers, like what they like to do as part of their jobs and what others can go to them for,” said Lush, who is a committed long-term user of teambuilding activities. “We are an extremely fast-growing team, so one of the keys for me was to find a way to work better with each other by understanding each other better.”
The Corporate Games program included a self-assessment exercise known as STAR, which stands for styles, abilities and reactors. Lush said that one of the things she and her participants discovered was that others do not always perceive them as they perceive themselves. “That was really fascinating,” said Lush, “because we understood the dynamics that made us go to each other for help — because you’re a certain type of person, even if you don’t see yourself that way. It was about recognizing the value of each person and how not all of us have to be the same, how our differences are actually good.” She added that the exercise also helped to bridge the generational and ethnic gaps on her diverse team. It also provided important insights into personality types and how they impact working relationships that they had never gotten before.
Finally, a game based on the TV show “Survivor” taught participants about their strengths and weaknesses and how to perform better as a team by depending on one another.
Lush added that the exercise delivered another important benefit in the fast-paced, high-pressure work environment that characterizes Kaiser Permanente. “I think teamwork is something that sometimes gets left by the wayside when we are so focused on what we’re doing as individuals,” she said. “We no longer live in a society where you work for a company for 35 years and then get the handshake and the gold watch. We live in an era where you make something of yourself, and you are valued on the results that you get. So we get into that focused mode as individuals rather than as team members. But when we lose teamwork, we lose the incredible creativity, depth and the multitude of great ideas that come from working as a team.”
Eric Johnston is CEO of Americas Generators in Miami. The fast-growing, 15-year-old company manufacturers and distributes commercial and industrial generators. Each year for the past five years, Johnston has hosted all of his employees on a three-day cruise to the Bahamas.
Because the company had a particularly good year last year, and grew its staff as a result, Johnston
Regional directors for Applebee’s International put their team skills to the test in the Corporate Sail-Race Challenge created by the Offshore Sailing School in Fort Myers, FL. The demands of sailing quickly expose a team’s weak links, and demonstrate that each crew member’s contributions are critical to the team’s overall success.
Photo courtesy of Tim Sackett, Applebee’s International |
wanted to add a new dimension to the cruise. So, he did his homework, found a freelance consultant in Atlanta, and created his own version of the TV show “The Amazing Race.” It was the first time, as employee or CEO of a company, that Johnston had experienced teambuilding. “I wanted to bring our team together, because we’ve grown so much in the past year,” said Johnston, who enlisted his assistant, Carmen Garcia, to help him create an original exercise that would excite his troops. “I thought it would be a really good thing, with all the new people, to bring everybody together from different departments so they could relate better to one another. I thought it would be good for everyone, from forklift operators to management, to spend time together.”
But as a newcomer to teambuilding, he took nothing for granted. “I did a lot of research,” he said. “I also talked to people in the company who had done various teambuilding events over the years, and what they liked and didn’t like about them. And a lot of people said, ‘Aw, geez, not one of those teambuilding events again.’ So I said, ‘Well, what did you not like about them?’ The feedback I got was that a lot of times they really didn’t bring people together. So, I tried to get feedback on something they’d actually like to do, and something they thought would be beneficial. And the whole ‘Amazing Race’ idea just sort of took off. People got really excited about it.”
Working with consultant John Sivak, Johnston and Garcia combined the adventure of GPS tracking devices with the intrigue of a search for pieces of a puzzle that delivered a message about the company’s mission. The result was a three-hour excursion for 40 employees and their guests, divided into six teams, across 
Nassau while the cruise ship was in port for a day. The game also included an exercise in which employees told two truths and one lie about themselves. Teammates had to figure out which statement was the lie.
The day culminated with an awards banquet aboard the ship. “The whole thing went off without a hitch, and we had great feedback,” Johnston said.
Contrarian Views
Despite the popularity of high-profile teambuilding activities such as skydiving, sailing or romps across a tropical island, there is another view that suggests that such adventures ultimately miss the mark by substituting flash for substance.
Kevin J. Fleming, Ph.D., a Jackson, WY, neuropsychologist with a background in team dynamics, and Don Schmincke, a former Johns Hopkins University physicist who now operates The Saga Institute in Towson, MD, believe that modern teambuilding has become terribly misguided — and largely ineffective.
“What we find,” said Schmincke, who works directly with about 1,000 CEOs in a typical year, “is that the entire premise of team training is wrong. A lot of it is
Stockton Turner, a mortgage banking company based in Maitland, FL, incorporated a white-water rafting teambuilding adventure into an incentive trip to Costa Rica, Central America.
Photo courtesy of Stockton Turner |
intended to address dysfunctional behavior — people are not working as a team, they’re not communicating well, there’s infighting, back-stabbing, blaming. That’s what drives CEOs to want to bring in some kind of training to stop that, to help employees work better as a team.
“But the point is that people don’t wake up in the morning and say I’m going to go into work today and be a dysfunctional S.O.B. People are doing it for a reason — and usually the reason is driven by some sort of fear-based or threat-based perception of the environment, whereby these dysfunctional behaviors are actually coping mechanisms for dealing with those perceptions.” Such issues, Schmincke insisted, cannot be resolved by rafting down the Colorado River.
Fleming agrees. “We see more and more in business today that people are hanging on to internal dialogues that don’t ever get put out there,” he said, “even in a teambuilding session of a traditional nature, so we’re seeing a lot of misalignment around personal actions in business when it comes to what the actual goals of the company are.”
Both Fleming and Schmincke stress that no teambuilding exercise can be truly successful unless it is well matched to a precise corporate objective, and can be measured for effectiveness and return on investment.
By that standard, Schmincke said, more than 80 percent of all teambuilding activities fail to deliver any lasting benefit, according to research studies. And success, both he and Fleming believe, has little, if anything, to do with jumping from an airplane or sailing a racing yacht.
In his corporate teambuilding work, Fleming uses a computerized Schelling Point assessment process, named for the Nobel Prize-winning American economist Thomas Schelling and introduced in his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict (Harvard University Press). In game theory, a Schelling Point is a solution that people will use in the absence of communication, because it seems natural or relevant to them. In his book, Schelling describes what later came to be known as a Schelling Point: “each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do.”
Such is the daunting complexity of modern workplace dynamics, Fleming said.
Schmincke uses a 700-year-old training theory for samurai in Japan, combined with his expert knowledge of anthropology and evolutionary genetics, to create custom-tailored programs that are based on extensive input from top management about the exact goals and working environment at the company where he is doing a teambuilding exercise.
Neither Schmincke nor Fleming incorporates any adventure or outdoor activities into their work. Both claim to get exceptional results.
In terms of skepticism about formulaic teambuilding exercises, CEO Johnston of Americas Generators tends to be moderate but resolute. He is now an enthusiastic believer in the power of teambuilding, but he offers a caveat of his own. “If you’re going to do it, be involved as a top manager,” he said. “Take a role in it. Don’t just pass it off to someone else. Have ownership of it. That was important to me. And talk to your staff and get a feel for something they’d really like to do. Don’t try to pound a square peg into a round hole by just taking a standard teambuilding exercise off the shelf. It just doesn’t work.” C&IT