In the News

Effective Teambuilding
Boost Camaraderie And The Bottom Line

By George Seli, www.themeetingmagazines.com

If one had asked Allstate’s 220 sales leaders what they thought of their recent teambuilding event at the Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas, the likely response would have been, “How sweet it is!” Divided into teams of 10, the participants sculpted chocolate for 45 minutes under the guidance of Las Vegas-based Creative Cooking School’s chefs, while master pastry chef and Food Network emcee Keegan Gerhard provided commentary. A mobile video camera circled among the 22 tables, displaying the edible centerpieces on a screen as they took shape. “We mixed our home-office folks with the field folks, and they got to know each other very well and had a good time doing it,” said Brian Bartlow, a sales operations manager and conference planner based in Allstate’s Northbrook, IL, office. “The team was built, I guarantee that.”

The program was the largest culinary teambuilding event The Creative Cooking School had orchestrated, and exemplified the principles of the institution’s founder, Catherine Margles. Teambuilding enables professionals who usually communicate through e-mail and conference calls to spend meaningful face-to-face time with each other.

At the end of the day, the best route is the one that gets you there — groups learn this valuable business metaphor while participating in Team Building USA’s canoeing orienteering adventure.

“They can be in the next office over and you’re sending them e-mails. That’s how corporate America is structured these days,” Margles explained. A teambuilding event also sends attendees a message that their company is “one that recognizes the importance of people getting along and working together.” And culinary teambuilding in particular (1) allows a company to “kill two birds with one stone” by affording a group both a gourmet meal (or dessert) and a bonding experience, (2) provides a level playing field among participants (more so than athletic events) and (3) has a delectable end result everyone can appreciate.

Teambuilding is especially critical for insurance or financial companies undergoing mergers or creating a new division. In such cases, working relationships among employees often need to be established or reinforced, and the success of a teambuilding event will ultimately impact the bottom line during and after the restructuring. In consequence, more thought is put into the design of teambuilding activities these days, with companies increasingly hiring external consultants to ensure the strongest ROI for the programs. According to Christy Lee, operations manager with Cosmo Cool Concepts, a Houston, TX-based DMC, “Over the years the teambuilding side of our business has definitely grown. When I first started with the company about seven years ago, a lot of companies did more tours, but now they’ve moved to doing teambuilding instead.”

Comfort Zone
But whether or not a company hires a third party, in-house planners do well to know basic approaches to effective teambuilding, beginning with sensitivity to participants’ “comfort zone.” When people are out of that zone, they tend to rely on each other more, which heightens interactivity, and they are more likely to remember the experience. Thus, activities with some element of the unexpected or unfamiliar are preferred. That may mean taking the group to a wilderness setting or staying at the resort and learning an exotic craft. Yet a balance must be struck, for if the activity is too difficult, esoteric and/or risky, the experience can become negative and participants enter what Miriam Ricketts, managing partner with Chagrin Falls, OH-based Executive Edge Inc., calls the “panic zone.”

Panic Zone
“There’s an art in balancing the experience so people can learn, and they’re slightly uncomfortable because they’re in a new environment, but they’re not freaked out,” Ricketts said. The panic zone is in fact the pitfall of much “extreme” teambuilding, where participants can become more focused on survival than learning. Allstate’s chocolate-molding event strikes a nice balance because it’s not something attendees do every day, yet it’s also not intimidating. Indeed, not all attendees want an adrenalin rush along with their teambuilding.

However, most do want more than a good time among coworkers, as do companies with business objectives to satisfy. After all, bonding and networking can be fostered in a social environment with no particular take-away messages that can apply to the workplace. Allstate’s sales leaders not only “got to know each other very well,” as Bartlow pointed out, but also had to brainstorm what kind of centerpiece to create and then coordinate among their team the various tasks involved. Such activities enable participants to discover and balance out each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and develop a capacity for innovation in a new situation. Teambuilding that does not further that kind of learning and self-improvement is suspect, Ricketts contended. “There are so many two-men-and-a-truck teambuilders out these days (who say) ‘Let’s get together and play whirly ball and call it teambuilding,’” she warned. Furthermore, the activity should be designed in the context of organizational objectives. “We use the 3C model,” said Ricketts. “You learn content in a context and among a community of peers.”

Raising The Bar
Executive Edge’s primary client for the past 15 years has been Ernst & Young, a company that “really values experiential learning, which is what a lot of the active teambuilding programs are,” said Ricketts. Every year, Ernst & Young stages a leadership conference for 2,000 interns who participate in activities invented with leadership and teamwork skills in mind. Some are classic problem-solving exercises such as assembling a puzzle while blindfolded, while others introduce the interns to the kind of culture they may be hired into, including company ethics. In Raising the Bar, participants face each other and must lower a collapsible tent pole resting on the tops of their forefingers from chest level to the ground. “It’s tricky because they think it’s easy to do and instead what it does is start to go up higher and higher,” Ricketts described. “Especially during the time when the accounting firms came under great scrutiny, around the (Arthur) Andersen implosion, any kind of activity that brought up ethics and integrity (was valuable). And that one did because it’s easy to cheat on that activity.”

Business Metaphors
Teambuilding events become classics because they reliably teach practical lessons using the right metaphors. Even ropes courses are not played out. “Maybe 10 percent of what we do is ropes course related,” said Ricketts. “There’s really good research that they work very well to support individuals stepping out and taking risks with team support, especially the high ropes. Somebody who is up there 30 feet held by their teammates on the rope is a good metaphor for individuals, maybe salespeople, stepping out and really taking a risk with their team to support them.” Once again, organizational objectives will determine if that kind of ropes course is the best choice: Are there employees who would benefit from a personal opportunity to shine, or is overall team cohesiveness desired?

Employees’ skill sets complement each other in any successful organization, but it’s rare that professionals are not called upon to “fill in” for each other on occasion. That scenario can be underscored through various teambuilding exercises, such as Cosmo Cool Concepts’ popular version of bike building. Participants are split randomly into teams and charged with assembling a junior bicycle that will be donated to a needy child, as well as designing a card for the child. Naturally, the first task is more suited to mechanically inclined participants and the latter to the creative ones. “Once they’re in teams we split them in half again and tell them that the creative people are going to work on the card and the mechanical people on the bicycle,” Lee explained. “Then it’s a race to see who can build the bike correctly first, and once they get going for a little while we blow a whistle and have them switch sides.” Participants’ comfort zones are certainly impinged upon, but any stress is ameliorated if the person who previously worked on the card or bicycle had been proceeding in an organized manner with a clear direction. “It teaches you to leave a good trail behind of what you do so that people can pick up after you,” Lee said. “We end up switching them back at the end.”

Calling All Picassos
The bike-building event is a competition, but effective teambuilding need not be. “Calling All Picassos,” for example, simply has a group objective: painting a larger version of an image. “We have a picture that’s painted on a small scale and then we have canvasses with the picture sketched out on them. Each team works on a panel of the picture,” Lee explained. “So they’re really all trying to work separately to ensure the picture flows.” The activity is a powerful metaphor, yet some companies may want an element of competition because it caters to their corporate culture. For instance, a financial firm’s traders and salespeople tend to be naturally competitive people. Still, it is advisable that groups, not individuals, vie with each other, if collaboration is to be learned.

“Olympic” Competition
Competition also energizes the proceedings and adds to the fun, an ingredient that saves teambuilding from becoming just another task. Sports-oriented events tend to have the fun built in, of course. Janice D. Torretta, CMP, GG, AJP, is president of The Lulay Group and consults for firms such as BDO Seidman LLP on teambuilding programs. As an in-house planner with Merrill Lynch for six years, she coordinated team “Olympics” that included moderately strenuous events such as relay races and blow-up obstacle courses. Attendees would convene in sunny Florida from places as diverse as San Francisco and New York, don team jerseys and march into a fully branded venue decorated with flags and even an Olympic torch. “We also had a big tent set up for lunch and had it all catered,” Torretta related. “In each glass was a napkin that matched the color of their team. So when they walked into the dining area, they knew where they had to sit and got a chance to really bond. They didn’t necessarily talk about the teambuilding, but the teambuilding became a springboard for other things.” In contrast to a more cerebral exercise, this lighthearted competition had the advantage of being an “icebreaker.” “People didn’t mind making fools of themselves,” said Torretta. “You take people out of their element and sometimes they are not as outgoing as you’d like them to be, but the Olympics broke down any kind of reservations they may have had.”

It’s unlikely the program would have been a positive experience had participants been faced with inordinately difficult athletic challenges. Therefore, it’s important to avoid frustration by selecting activities that are within attendees’ capacities, yet not so easy that they become uninteresting. “There’s a balance there as well,” said Ricketts, whose company trains Ernst & Young recruiters to facilitate teambuilding and designs “learning journals” that help guide attendees through the exercises. Cosmo Cool Concepts also ensures that participants enjoy a measure of success at “Calling All Picassos” by including an artist to assist with technique.

Personal Enrichment
Many of the best teambuilding programs are rewarding in ways beyond workplace applications, such as personal enrichment and community service. After Allstate’s sales leaders settled down to dinner at tables graced by their completed centerpieces, a sommelier discussed, appropriately enough, chocolate and wine pairings. Attendees took their newfound culinary knowledge and skills home with them. “What’s rewarding to me are the ones who say they can’t do this or don’t cook and then find they can flip a crepe or roll out their own homemade ravioli,” said Margles. “And to keep it a positive learning experience, at the end everyone graduates with a certificate in gourmet cuisine. For example, every single person from the Allstate group got a diploma in gourmet wine and chocolate.”

Groups who engage in Cosmo Cool Concepts’ bike-building event receive a deep sense of satisfaction, as the bikes are donated to charity. Executive Edge coordinated an Ernst & Young event with a similar reward: “They wanted a community-service experience, and so we went with a group of 70 senior managers whose goal was to feed and clothe 2,000 people in 24 hours in New York City,” said Ricketts. “They actually achieved it.”

In general, if a business unit seeks to improve integration among its members, Ricketts recommends a concerted effort over nine to 18 months that includes regular teambuilding exercises along with post-event analyses of behavior change, which help to demonstrate ROI. “We have assessment tools that we use with a team before and after the event and back in the workplace again,” Ricketts said. In some cases ROI can be demonstrated without formal tools. For example, one of Executive Edge’s clients launched a teambuilding initiative for managers, and ROI was subsequently established on the basis of reduced turnover. “It costs a lot to retrain people and get new people in,” said Ricketts. “Because they had created more of a team culture, they had fewer people leaving, and actually tracked a savings of a couple million dollars in one year.”

Of course, ROI can also be improved with a reduced investment in the program itself, and in fact there are many choices for cost-effective teambuilding. The prevailing consideration is whether such events still carry a compelling message and develop the skills an organization needs. That requires some expertise to ascertain, expertise that a company’s managers and planners may not have. “Many groups just go and get the activities and do them and wonder why they backfired.” The lesson is that random group activities will at best facilitate socializing and networking. They will not build teams unless they are good metaphors for teamwork in the office. I&FMMback to "In the News"

To Book your Event, Please Call us at: 800-611-CHEF