Mixing business with teamwork

Mixing business with teamwork. By David Robinson.

This month I had the chance to work with Discovery Performance on one of their team development programmes. Coming from an outdoor background it was interesting to see another way groups can be tested and challenged. As outdoor practitioners we often get a bit of tunnel vision forgetting that there are plenty of other ways people can be tested and develop without necessarily taking them to the great outdoors.

Instead this time the groups were set up as a business with one simple objective, make money. They needed to allocate roles, Managing Director, Financial Director, Head of Operations and Sales Director all of which had to be rotated in the team. They were then given their brief and fictional bank account along with a list of expenses they had to pay and a list of ways they could earn their money. I was to be their chaperone for the day allocating them their credits as and when they earned them.

I felt a lot like one of Lord Alan Sugar’s right hand people as I watched the whole thing play out throughout the day. The group were all graduates on an 18 month progressive programme and they didn’t do anything I expected them to. No planning, no costing up, just on the hoof let’s get out there and earn some money. It was very much felt like an episode of The Apprentice as I watched the group slowly realise they were haemorrhaging money and desperately needed to raise cash before their new start-up went into administration.

All the difficulties the team went through and all the failures were important parts of the whole learning process. It created plenty of discussion at the end where we were able to look at not just what went wrong but also why it went wrong too. When the team split up what was and wasn’t being communicated? How much planning took place and how would that have changed things? How did they work with customers and what effect did that have on their income?

All in all I felt that the groups went through a fantastic and well organised comprehensive team building experience. And just goes to show with a bit of creativity you can mix business principles with some outdoor and indoor challenges to come up with an alternative team building experience to really build a stronger more cohesive team.

For more information about Team Building activities for Businesses www.lopc.co.uk/corporate

To contact David    corporate@lopc.co.uk