The Team-Building Training Which Wasn’t Worthless
The Haven interrupts its normal publishing to report the death of Mrs. Ada Fabiszak, the creator of team-building training which wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Team-building purports to turn loose groups of employees into fully-integrated goal-focussed high-performance teams — and do it in an afternoon. How? By having members pair off, sit back-to-back on a floor, interlock arms, and try to stand up. Or have the team stand in a small circle, face the center, grasp each others’ hands in random fashion, then work together to untie the resulting human knot. Or do things which were even more senseless and idiotic.
Corporateworld loved team-building. It could be held in an on-site conference room, facilitated by in-house HR staffers, and last only a few hours — which employees could make up by putting in overtime on top of their normal overtime.
Managers loved team-building. It relieved them of the need to define their team’s goals and responsibilities; establish work processes to achieve them; measure and monitor the team’s effectiveness; develop people’s professional skills; and resolve personal problems. It was a magic wand: wave it over their employees, and poof! — they were a “high-performance team.”
Staffers were less impressed. They didn’t see how using broomsticks to pick up a volleyball and drop it in a waste basket eliminated work process disconnects. Or four-way tug ‘o war filled gaps in expertise. How building towers out of balloons resolved role conflicts. Or making cardboard-and-duct-tape boats rectified leadership weaknesses. To them, team-building exercises were simplistic, silly, and didn’t relate to real-world business activities. And they especially detested exercises which involved blindfolds, athletics, and invasions of personal space.
Some trainers tried to make team-building somewhat realistic. In one exercise a team performed simple tasks while packed in a cubicle; it was called called Sardines. Or they built a replica of the company headquarters with Post-it® Notes; that was called Don’t Break Wind. And in Seagull Piñata, they made an effigy of a corporate “seagull” — a internal auditor, for example, because they “flew in, crapped all over everyone, then flew away” — then beat the papier-mâché out of them with broom handles.
Mrs. Fabiszak, however, used team-building to give employees skills they’d actually use in Corporateworld.
Her WAG exercise, for instance. Teams were told to come up with a WAG (wild-ass guess) for the cost to build a large computer system. They weren’t given any requirements. Yet their WAG had to be at least as accurate as the estimate from the information technology department.
This was a challenge. IT departments have a precise method for estimating project costs: someone pulls a dollar bill from their wallet, and locates the eight-digit serial number; that figure in dollars becomes the estimate to build a large system. (Seven digits are used for medium systems; six for small ones.)
Participants in Mrs. Fabiszak’s exercises came up with even more accurate methods. One team counted the “Reply All” emails in their Inboxes, and multiplied that by 10,000. That WAG underestimated the project’s actual cost by eighty percent; IT’s figure was off by ninety. Another team improved on that by making a SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess). Naturally, they used Six Sigma. No, not the data-driven methodology; the team just counted the Six Sigma binders gathering dust on their office shelves, and multiplied that by 100,000. That SWAG was off by only sixty percent.
WAG/SWAG exercises were for IT employees. Mrs. Fabiszak created ones for other departments as well. Such as Marketing. Each member of a team was told to voice their opinion of a sales strategy. Then Mrs. Fabiszak identified the most ridiculous one as being the highest-paid person’s opinion, or “HiPPO’s”. The goal was to see how fast the members could throw their own ideas under the bus and, per the exercise’s name, Get Behind The HiPPO.
There was also a Human Resources exercise. A team was presented with a tower built from wooden blocks: the tower represented the company; each block was five percent of the employees. The team was told to lay off employees by carefully withdrawing one block from the tower. Then they were told to do another layoff. And another. The idea was to see how many “employees” they could remove before the “company” collapsed. The name of this exercise: Downsizing Jenga.
Most of Mrs Fabiszak’s exercises related to common challenges in Corporateworld. For instance, a team was given data which established that a business initiative was a failure. Then they were told it was an executive’s pet project. The goal was to massage the data so as to make the project look like a success, and the executive seem entitled to a bonus. The name of this exercise: Createalytics.
In an another example, a team were given a simple task to complete in ten minutes. A minute into it, they were given an additional task. Then another, and another, and another. The idea was to see how long it took the team to realize they’d accepted so many tasks, they couldn’t do any of them well — that they’d gone from multitasking to Faultytasking.
Over time, Mrs. Fabiszak’s team-building training gained a reputation for being the best in the business. Indeed, CEOs of America’s biggest companies have attributed their advancement to what they learned in her team-building exercises. Ones like Cutting Edge Decision-Avoidance. Visioning With 20/20 Hindsight. Re-Languaging Stale Ideas To Make Them Seem Fresh. Re-Purposing Failures To Re-Delegate Blame. And When You Screw The Pooch, Make Sure It’s Backward-Compatible.
