Few people are as knee-deep in our work-related anxieties and sticky office politics as Alison Green, who has been fielding workplace questions for a decade now on her website Ask a Manager. In Direct Report, she spotlights themes from her inbox that help explain the modern workplace and how we could be navigating it better.
A corporate “hiking retreat” made headlines last month when a participant was left stranded overnight on a 14,230-foot mountain. The employee and his co-workers were on a daylong “team-building” hike, and he was left behind while the rest of his colleagues made it down the mountain safely. The next day, emergency responders found him trapped in a gully.
That a corporate team-building event could end in disaster will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been forced to participate in one. Team-building events are ostensibly designed to boost group cohesion, communication, cooperation, and morale—all worthwhile goals! But in practice, many team-building events are centered on things like blindfolded trust falls, humiliating dance performances, and other activities without any clear connection to those business goals. And although most don’t leave employees literally stranded in the wilderness, they do frequently put them in physically or emotionally uncomfortable situations.
Here are some of the bizarre corporate team-building stories people have shared with me over the years:
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During a previous job, I worked on a team that was having trouble getting along, so they brought in someone to help us work together. First activity? We had to go around the room and tell everyone what we didn’t like about them. We might have also had to add what we did like about them, but I honestly remember only the criticisms and people bursting into tears. We went from simply not being able to work together to actively disliking each other in about 30 minutes. Then we ate a boxed lunch and ended the day by filling out personality tests.
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We had to take a big gulp of soda and spit the soda into a partner’s mouth! It was incredibly disgusting. I have no clue who thought that this was a good idea and who approved it. Some of the guys got into it, but most everyone declined.
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I once had to sit through two hours of a team-building exercise that first involved us all sitting cross-legged on the floor and holding hands with our eyes closed, while the leader described us flying over the ocean into the “temple of the dolphin.” She got very vivid in her description of this imaginary place. It was incredibly difficult not to laugh. After we opened our eyes, we had to watch videos of dolphins and point out the leadership skills they were demonstrating. I am not joking. We did that for well over an hour.
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My team did “horse whispering,” where you work with horses to learn about effective communication. One of the horses got overexcited, galloped toward the center of the barn where we were being briefed, and nearly trampled one of my co-workers. It was a bonding experience to a certain extent, but only because we all thought we were going to die.
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My boss was organizing an event for an off-site, and he decided that we should go canyoning. He knew that I was afraid of heights and that a colleague of mine was afraid of small, enclosed spaces. Both of us had been trying to slowly push our boundaries, and he thought that this exercise would be fun because it would also assist us in something we were trying to accomplish privately. The event began with a 50-meter rappel. That’s a 164-foot drop. And as you dropped, the walls of the cliffs narrowed into this dark, constricted space, with a mountain lake on the bottom. We gritted our teeth and did that part, only to realize that the next stages were worse. It was a half-day event, and once we started, the only way out was to finish the course. There was hyperventilating and actual tears.
Too often, managers plan events that they themselves would enjoy without considering whether the rest of their team will feel the same. This is bad enough when it’s something like “We’ll all take personality tests together,” but it’s far more of a problem when it involves physical activities that not everyone can safely or comfortably participate in:
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My manager came to our team about a year ago. She is young and very athletic, into running marathons, snowboarding, hiking, etc. She is also very into team-building activities and making our team feel like a family. … My problem is with our team-building activities. She states she cannot make them mandatory but that a co-worker and I are the only ones who do not participate. I am not against these activities. I used to enjoy them. But with her, every activity has to be extreme and sporty. There was the 10-mile hike, the 5K run, the rock climbing, the parasailing. … I have some health problems and cannot do activities like these. I suggested low-impact activities like a board game day or a barbecue in the park, and she shot me down without even putting it to a vote with the rest of the team. Those ideas are not exciting enough.
Each month when I don’t show up to one of these activities, she writes on my monthly review that I was not a team player and refused to participate in team-building activities. She is a good manager otherwise, but I am quite angry to be getting points taken from my performance review because my body can’t hack a 10K hike or run.
Ironically, although these events are billed as team-building, they can make (at least some) employees feel alienated from colleagues—the exact opposite of what they’re supposed to accomplish. One worker emailed me because his boss was requiring everyone to do tai chi together several mornings a week, allegedly as a form of team building. The employee had a medical condition that prevented him from participating, so he was told to sit silently and watch everyone else. He wrote, “It has left me feeling singled out and punished for not being able to participate, and fielding questions from co-workers about why I’m not following along with the program.”
All too often, employers plan team-building events without putting real thought into how they’ll produce better results, or they use them as a substitute for more-meaningful work on communication or cooperation issues. Real team building isn’t about one or two events a year. It’s about how a team runs day to day. If a manager, team, or organization doesn’t prioritize communication, corporate, and morale year-round, one-off team-building events aren’t going to change that—and can deeply irritate employees in the process.
It’s time for workplaces to kill off artificially designed experiences like the ones above. The most effective team building comes from teams grappling with real-life challenges in the normal course of working together, and doing so collaboratively and respectfully, with opportunities for meaningful input. Doing that takes good management, day after day. Going rock climbing or baby-birding soda into each other’s mouths won’t get us there.
