When team building goes bad

[Savonarola]

Jeff Immelt never gives us psilocybin mushrooms.  Some people have all the luck:

Paintballing The Boss: Office Team-Building Exercises Gone Bad

Who can forget that game of Twister played in a skirt? Or the failed "trust fall" where the boss ends up on the ground?

Office team-building exercises often create lasting memories — just not necessarily ones you want to remember.

Several years ago Ben Johnson worked at a health foods store in Iowa. He remembers store management stringing up a donkey piñata to pump up the workers.

"Pinned to its chest was a name tag for a rival store," Johnson says. "They explained to everyone that this was, in fact, an effigy and that we were going to work together to figuratively, literally destroy the competition."

In lieu of candy, the piñata was filled with dollar coins. An overzealous middle manager with a baseball bat was first up, and he obliterated it.

"So when this thing explodes, dozens of the dollar gold Sacagawea coins fly through the air everywhere," Johnson says. "Someone in the front row takes one in the face and goes down. They ricochet off the walls. And when the coins finally stop, I emerge from underneath the table, there's just a stunned silence."

The coins are like blood money, and no one picks them up. Johnson thinks of the whole fiasco as an omen since the store eventually fell to the competition.

Johnson is now a manager at a library, and he says there's an ironic twist: He's been tasked with organizing his own team-building event.

"I'm now that guy; I'm that manager subjecting people to these things," Johnson says.

Around the world, there are thousands of teamwork facilitators. Michael Cardus is one of them. He founded Create-Learning in Buffalo, N.Y. He says the point of trying something new — something that requires cooperation — is to inspire different methods of problem solving.

" 'Hey, this is novel. This is different.' And then you can hopefully have them talk about what worked in that activity and how they can transfer it back to the workplace," Cardus says.

But sometimes it backfires.


Several years ago, things didn't go well for Peter Brooks when his former employer bused his division to a suburban Washington, D.C., field. They were divided into teams for a round of paintball.

"We were issued safety goggles and paintball guns, one of which immediately misfired. It hit a district manager in the crotch," Brooks says.

He remembers that the game quickly devolved into screaming, pleading and retaliatory rage — the paintballs left large welts.

"A lot of people pointed their guns right at their supervisors, me included," Brooks says. "I shot mine right in the middle of the back, and then when he spun around with revenge in his eyes, I surrendered."

The bus ride home, he says, was dead silent.

"I think we were all really unprepared at the impact, literally — emotionally and physically — the impact of shooting paintballs at each other," Brooks says. "People were very mad at each other. There were apologies. There were heartfelt apologies."

Anne Thornley-Brown, president of Executive Oasis, which specializes in corporate team building, says there's a whole subcategory of bad exercises she calls extreme team-building.

"There are some CEOs who are weekend warrior types, and what they may do is compel the members of their team to participate in some really risky activities," she says.

Willy McGee's extreme experience happened last year during a retreat to Montauk, N.Y. The company he worked for was clearly in financial straits and full of dissent and discontent. But McGee says the CEO hoped to find salvation through group inspiration and seemed eager to appear cool and edgy to his young, 20-something staff.

"I think in order to win people back on his favor, he started going around and trying to hand out drugs," McGee says.

Psilocybin mushrooms, to be precise.

"So, at this point, about half the staff is arguing about who has it worse, at which job, and how we're getting screwed and what we're going to do next. And the other half started to eat psychedelic mushrooms," McGee says.

He remembers that after a midnight parade and a degree of mayhem, most of the employees settled down at the beach.

"We had this moment together on top of this lifeguard tower where we realized, 'Well, we're not going to save the business, but we could at least save the relationships here,' " McGee says.

The business closed in September, but McGee remains in touch with his former colleagues. Surviving trauma, he says, is its own kind of team-building.

One time, several companies ago, I went to some training in Orlando.  The technical part of the training lasted a day and a half; sales and marketing was for two full days.  There were events planned in the evenings both days.

The first days event was a buffet in a banquet hall where all the middle managers made self congratulatory speeches.  All the other engineers changed their flight arrangements to leave in the afternoon of the second day.  I stayed, having no real desire to leave Orlando in the winter for Detroit.  That turned out to be a good plan, as the company rented out a bar at Pleasure Island with live entertainment, open bar and much better food.

That was about the most comically inept team building I've ever been to.  After the rest of the engineers found out about it they felt that sales and marketing had deliberately not invited them to the real party.

Has anyone else ever been to a team building gone wrong?

[garbon]

My recent team building ended up great. Just drinks and dinner.

[crazy canuck]

My recent team building ended up great. Just drinks and dinner.

Those are the team building exercises Mrs. CC uses for her team.  People seem to appreciate it.

[The Brain]

It's the best kind. Been a long time since I encountered anything wilder than that.

[Ideologue]

I have never been part of a team building exercise.

[CountDeMoney]

I have never been part of a team building exercise.

You're not missing anything;  it's the same morons and douchebags you work with, only under orders to be nicer.

It's all bullshit.

[Admiral Yi]

Still beats working.

[CountDeMoney]

I'd rather be left alone and working that doing trust falls.

[garbon]

I'd rather be left alone and working that doing trust falls.

Yeah I've never had team building that didn't take away at least a part of my evening.

[grumbler]

I think that "team building" as a separate activity works up to a certain age, and then doesn't really work after that.  I found that, leading a team, the best team-building activity was simply the weekly planning session wherein everyone set their goals for the week, and heard what everyone else's goals were, and could ask questions, coordinate things, and generally own the team's problems and solutions.  Some problems and solutions aren't team problems or solutions, and no amount of asshattery will change that.

The "let's stop being a real team so we can go off and pretend to be a pretend team" stuff is for the birds.

[Ideologue]

Still beats working.

Shit, ain't like I have to go to a trust exercise to not do that.

[Zanza]

I organized our last team building event and we went - among other things - kart racing. That was a lot of fun, although we almost had an accident when two female colleagues who are friends in normal circumstances got so competitive that their karts were on top of each other in a particular bad crash. No one was hurt, but it was close. Most people generally seem to enjoy team building events and you can just opt out in my department, so no one is forced to attend.

[DGuller]

I organized our last team building event and we went - among other things - kart racing.

That's actually something I can get behind.

[garbon]

you can just opt out in my department, so no one is forced to attend.

[grumbler]

you can just opt out in my department, so no one is forced to attend.

  That does seem to defeat the entire purpose, doesn't it?  Those who don't need it will take attend, and those who do need it will opt out.