Imagine a place where extreme physical challenge, outdoor adventure, and teamwork intersect.
You don’t have to wait for the next episode of Survivor to find it. In fact, if you are an employee of Lens Crafters, Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, or Taco Bell, you may have already experienced this venue first hand-in a wilderness-based corporate team-building seminar.
For several decades, employers looking to increase productivity in their workforce have turned to applied human behavior science for guidance. What it all boils down to, say the human resource specialists, is maximizing cooperation and teamwork. Inspired by this realization, employers began sending their employees to corporate team-building seminars in the 80’s and 90’s.Today it is relatively commonplace to head for an airtight conference room, to be greeted by the corporate psychologist, who offers amply iced doughnuts and Styrofoam cups filled with megawatt coffee, as if to say, it’s going to be a long day folks-fuel up. Hefty booklets waiting on a table promise to yield the secrets to greater corporate harmony, while neatly assembled rows of folding chairs ensure endless hours of uncushioned gluteal containment.
While the attendees haven’t had to pay for their seats, it’s quickly becoming clear that their seats are going to pay. “Sometimes we put a gag order on the boss, so that he or she cannot be in control,” says Bruce Leadbetter. If that image doesn’t sit well with you, why not try what others have already discovered-a more interesting but less civilized team-building approach. For participants in a Confluence Expeditions seminar on one of Montana’s churning whitewater rivers, the ability to remain seated at all may be all they hope for.
The alternative, being bucked into swirling, icy waters, just doesn’t sound appealing. In a Team Building Through Adventure seminar, participants who locate any hospitable place to sit in the prickly Sonoran desert are lucky. Rock walls, on the other hand, are easier to come by-steep rock walls-and rugged hiking and mountain biking trails, too.
All are part of a land navigation course that serves as the experiential classroom for the teaching of various team-building concepts. How, one might ask, does this work? First of all, old habits need to be broken. At the beginning of a Team Building Through Adventures seminar, for example, the larger corporate group is divided by the program directors into teams. Self-selection into familiar groups and roles is prohibited, helping to break down hierarchies so that more egalitarian, inclusive patterns can be established. “Sometimes we put a gag order on the boss, so that he or she cannot be in control,” says Bruce Leadbetter, founder of Arizona-based White Knuckle Adventures and chief architect of the Team Building Through Adventure seminar. In the next step of the process, everyone learns a skill vital to completion of the course, such as orienteering with a map and compass, or mountain bike repair.
They must then teach this skill to the rest of the team. Relying on the “expertise” of each member, the team moves through a series of natural obstacles. Judges award points for successful and timely completion of each phase of the course. Additional points are awarded when team “cohesion” is demonstrated.
Because of these unique rules, the only winning team in this game is the true team itself. But according to Leadbetter, it’s not just the game that’s instrumental in bringing people together. It’s also the setting in which the game is played. “Wilderness is the only place where true teammanship can be taught,” he says.Whether or not it is truly the only place, many people in the industry agree that it’s a good place to start. Perhaps it’s because the wilderness, for many in the corporate world, is new and different. The old world is left behind. “People forget about the rat race,” says Leadbetter.
The senses, inundated with new information, come alive. Eyes are drawn to the strange features of the landscape; ears are stunned by the absence of noise. For once, people actually pay attention. And they are involved in the experience-they have to be.
Lives may depend on it. To a rock climber, a rope is useless unless there is an alert person holding the other end. Of course, even if there is a person holding the other end, an element of the unpredictable, of danger, still exists in the wild. It may be this more than anything else that makes people realize how far away they are from home… and how much they truly need each other. The truth is we are a social species. It is in our nature to form tribes, teams, cooperative social units. Sometimes, we just need to be reminded. In a wilderness-based corporate team-building seminar, we can be.
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