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Building the Foundation for the "Lightbulb Moment"
October 03, 2008
By Rob Carey
Before rushing your people headlong into a ropes course in the woods, there's considerable work for you to do. First, when the team-building initiative is floated out to employees, it's unreasonable to expect immediate acceptance and enthusiasm—especially if teamwork and trust have not been emphasized and rewarded in the past.
"You have to start by acknowledging whatever the corporate reality has been up until now," says Brian Kathenes, principal of Progressive Business Concepts, in Hope, N.J., and author of How to Build Teams That Will Still Respect You in the Morning. "Some of my clients had for years stressed internal competition to maximize productivity; one actually gave a poorer performance review to someone who said, 'We accomplished the goal together,' instead of, 'I did it alone.' Obviously, an experiential program delivering the message that 'trusting others will make things better for everyone' won't get support in such places, unless participants can build trust at their own pace. A team-building program is a way for people to lose the fear that an extended hand will get ignored, or bitten. And telling people that will often generate the buy-in you need."
Once people are open simply to trying the team concept, an "aha!" experience becomes possible. Kathenes recently helped a particularly competitive group of employees arrive at one, by using an exercise called "the tarp race." Six groups of six people each were given large plastic tarps; three groups were set on one side of a field, three on the other. The objective: Groups that made it across the field in less than five minutes—without any group member stepping off a tarp and onto the grass—would be winners.
As the groups struggled towards the middle of the field and into each other's path, there was shouting between groups to "move out of the way." At the end of five minutes, no group had completed the task.
But for the second go-around, Kathenes reminded them that the award was not exclusive to the first group to get across in the time allotted—the award was for any group that completed the task in time. Suddenly, the three groups on one side of the field laid down their tarps for use by the members of every group on that side, and all advanced rapidly to midfield. There, the groups coming from the opposite side laid down their tarps adjacent to the arriving groups' so that everyone from both sides could advance even more quickly. Every group finished in under five minutes because of this cooperation, and were rewarded. "That 'lightbulb moment' is priceless for the participants—and for the executives who witness it among their employees," Kathenes says.
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