Paintballing and wall climbing are not the only ways to build a great team

He had no interest in methodology to measure outcomes. He was in pure Nike mode: Just do it, says Terry Prone about team-building.

Back in the Celtic Tiger days, the CEO of a big company came to see me, his eyes bright with excitement over what he wanted us to do for him. Team-building. Our eyes rolled and we swiftly said we didn’t do any of that paintballing stuff. Or climbing walls on a string. Nope. Not going to go there.

No, no, no, he said, this was completely different. He wanted his top managers to make a television programme. Not for broadcast. Just for team-building. Now, between you, me, and the wall, I have made a lot of television programmes at the end of which nobody was speaking to anybody else and no wrap party was held, so I couldn’t get the connection.

“It would take them out of their comfort zone,” he explained.

Removing people from their comfort zone means stopping them doing what they normally do and might even be good at, and putting them in a completely different situation, where they are likely to fail and be humiliated in front of the people who might, in the ordinary working day, be quite impressed by them.

We pointed this out to him, but he said he would be prepared to step outside his comfort zone to make this programme and had a commitment to never ask any of his staff to do anything he wouldn’t do. To tell him that he was clearly a TV presenter manque who wanted to play in a studio for a day and that this ambition mightn’t be shared by his colleagues would have been cruel. Anyway, the man was on a roll.

“It would teach them new skills,” he told us. At that point, one of my cohort who has an unfortunate habit of thinking first of truth and second of marketing, told him that skills cannot be built up in one day.

The skills involved in making a TV programme, this former producer announced, were story selection, autocue reading, make up, studio blocking, camera work, direction, presentation, interviewing and editing. This list, he added, wasn’t exhaustive. Merely indicative.

If he thought the list was going to dent the CEO’s enthusiasm, he couldn’t have been more wrong. With every item, the man’s glow got more pronounced. Yes, he said. All of the above. And, he conceded, he didn’t expect that any of his managers would, the following week, be ready to replace Dobbo, but it would give them insight. Great capacity, insight. Everybody claims it, few actually have it.

He wanted his team to make a documentary which could be shown to everybody in the company, about the emerging markets for their product. The backstory, he opined, would therefore be readily available to the production team. You can see that he was already getting into production mode, with his backstory.

Totting up the equipment, location, catering and bodies required for a combination of training and production, and adding contingency, because that’s what you do when playing the imponderables game, I hit him with a five-figure sum. Grand, he said. Plus VAT, I said. No problem, he said, his company evidently sitting on wads of cash.

He had no interest in methodology to measure outcomes. He was in pure Nike mode: Just do it. So we just did it. The team arrived on location at six in the morning, and my colleague the former producer/director snapped back into his old ways. He was forceful. General Patton forceful.

Just one notch short of bullying forceful. It was a joy to behold and to our surprise, the managers, who ranged in age from 20 to 60, bought into the exercise with a will. They panicked, fought with each other, reconciled, met deadlines, failed to meet deadlines and learned just how much real time is consumed in the production of 26 minutes of broadcast time.

Lunch was brought in. They didn’t eat it, so we did. Delicious, it was. Client leftovers, or in this case, food untouched by the client, is always better than what we provide for ourselves, we not being one of those giant techie corporations that feeds their workers like fighting cocks.

The group also demonstrated that they were already strong on corporate IQ, at the first meeting, where, in complete consensus, of course, without any pushing from the CEO, he was selected as presenter. He told them he was humbled by them choosing him.

They smiled at him without their eyes taking part in the smile, and went on to do some remarkably prescient selection of the rest of the roles. The introverts and less physically mobile ended up as autocue operators and video editors, whereas the extroverts became camera operators and interviewers.

At the end of the day, they had a clunky but creditable production, and were all chuffed when the CEO announced that it was so good, the company could afford another half day to get it perfect. This announcement was made at a gourmet dinner to which all participants, including us, were bussed, and at which good wine flowed as generously as the Rhine.

Pulling me aside halfway through the meal, the CEO gestured at his people, demonstrably deep in the mutual love that follows survival and is fuelled by alcohol, and asked me if they were not the living embodiment of a great team, thanks to the day. He went on to generously cede the rights to this team building approach to my company, because, he said, it would make us a fortune.

Our own view was that the team would never watch television in quite the same way again, and had learned about working under pressure while having lots of fun. They themselves were fully convinced that it had been the best team-building exercise ever, particularly the guy who had previously been roped into building a boat that nobody was ever going to sail. This experience had left him bitter and twisted, whereas he was now heading off to edit videos he planned to make on his phone of his kids. It was, in short, a win/win.

The only problem is that teams, in the real world, are built over time. They are built by constant attention. They are built by leaders who understand that the overwhelming majority of people want to do a great job every day, are never motivated by pointless awards, but gain from public praise and learn from private guidance.

Great leaders know that formal yearly evaluations may be part of the corporate culture, but that trust, encouragement and clarity are pivotal every day.

That their door should never be closed, but, at the same time, should not facilitate the ingress of a constant procession of dead-catters: people who arrive every day with an outrage they want solved by someone else.

That ‘away days’ properly facilitated, can be immeasurably useful in retaining group focus and sharing information.

We can but hope that improved solvency will not lead companies into a new era of paintballing and wall climbing.

He had no interest in methodology to measure outcomes. He was in pure Nike mode: Just do it