“Teambuilding.” Is there any other word that elicits quite the same quality of itchy, queasy, I’m-sorry-I-think-I’m-scrubbing-the-bathroom-with-my-toothbrush-that-day reaction in business training-dom?
Announce an upcoming teambuilding activity (or day) and you can generally expect to see your organization’s introverts attempt to melt into the walls, while their colleagues who are heavy or frail or nonathletic or bruise easily cringe and stare at the floor, reliving those humiliating elementary school gym classes yet one more time.
Unlike leadership training, which focuses on real, concrete communication skills that can be appropriately applied in the workplace for decades, team-building activities are one-time events that tend to run along a continuum:
Innocuous and saccharine ———————————–Dangerously and ill-advised.
The silly, innocuous things I can excuse–even enjoy–as long as they take up only fifteen minutes or so of a daylong retreat. It’s probably not going to hurt anybody to know that I once, say, had a childhood paper route, or that my colleague Marcia won a Pat Benatar impersonation contest.
It’s the weirdly physical and aggressive teambuilding activities I just don’t get—nor do I want to. Thankfully, I’ve never worked at a company that expected me to risk bodily injury (after signing a waiver of liability, thank you very much) as a way to teach me to be a “team player,” but I have friends who have. I’m not sure how sweat, blood, sprains and contusions are supposed to help colleagues work together on the Bixby account, but apparently somebody does because these things are out there.
If you run an internet search on teambuilding, you might be surprised at the kinds of activities somebody, somewhere, decided would be a great way to rally the troops.
At any rate, I just want to say… I’ll be shampooing the television when the rest of the team is enduring any of the following teambuilding activities:
1. Spanking. Yes, really. Who didn’t see that lawsuit coming? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?
2. Dodgeball. No, thanks. I paid my dues to this beast of a “game” in the currency of humiliation and hematomae by the age of 10, and I cannot imagine how whipping a ball at each other’s heads, torsos, or (censored) is going to help a team work better together. (See also: paintball and laser tag.)
3. Challenge courses. Look. If I had wanted to join the military, I promise you, I would have done so. The fact that I did not? And that I haven’t auditioned for Survivor? Should tell you that crawling in mud, swinging on ropes, dangling from poles, or climbing rock walls are not things that are going to make me a more enthusiastic part of the team.
4. Trust Falls. Especially after seeing a video of a woman conned into stepping onto a ladder and then allowed to drop, with full force, onto her back and head by a “motivational speaker” wearing a mullet. (It’s out there. It hurts to watch.)
5. Firewalking. That evergreen staple is still out there, and apparently it’s not unusual for 10-15% of participants to end up with 1st or 2nd degree burns on their feet after participating. (“I love the smell of napalm in the morning…smells like…TEAMBUILDING!”)
6. Mock Sumo Wrestling. Yeah, that one’s so weird, I don’t even know what to say about it.
7. Waterboarding. Because nothing says “I trust you guys with my life” quite like having them apply the Guantanamo Bay treatment. I know I, for one, cannot wait to be half-drowned by Cliff from accounting.