Building teamwork need not be absurd

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, May 13, 2007

One thing I’ve always liked about The Herald is the company has never made me do some goofy, potentially dangerous activity with my coworkers in the name of team building.

You know what I mean.

The things where you climb on rope courses up in the trees or close your eyes and fall backwards trusting that your colleagues will actually catch you.

Here, we have picnics. Or we get some tickets to the company’s suite at the Everett Events Center, where people from different departments can all get together to drink beer and whine about our pay or our bosses.

Wait. Cut that.

What I meant to say was where everybody gets together from various disciplines and departments to create high-performance, cross-functional work teams in pursuit of a common goal.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

You now know how I feel about goofy team-building stunts. So you probably can also tell why I enjoyed looking at the results of a recent survey by The Creative Group in Menlo Park, Calif.

It asked 250 marketing professionals to talk about the unusual team-building activities they have heard about or in which they’re taken part. Some of the answers included:

* Team skydiving.

* A group Segway tour.

* Line dancing on the beach in matching outfits.

* Navigating a maze thorugh a cornfield.

* A team surfing contest.

* Team drumming.

* Conducting a dog show.

* Creating a haunted house and inviting clients.

* Taking an improvisational comedy class.

Dave Wilmer, executive director of the marketing company, said some of the ideas weren’t all that much fun. Like:

* Shoveling horse manure in a stable.

* Camping at 9,000 feet while it rained.

* Jumping out of a tree and hoping the team would catch you.

Others forced the group to work together to solve a problem, including:

* Creating a human bridge to cross a small stream.

* Building a raft and using it to retrieve a torch without putting the flame out.

* Building a lifeboat and then deciding who to kick off, one by one.

My personal favorites were the trips where the company picked up the tab, such as:

* Flying a group of 20 employees to a ballgame in Chicago.

* Treating everyone to a glorious day of massages and chocolates.

* Taking the whole team to Disney World.

Do you have any stories or thoughts about team training you’d like to share? If so, send me an e-mail.

Mike Benbow: 425-339-3459; benbow@heraldnet.com.