Everybody Leaves With A Lanyard and A Glass of Wine
There comes a moment during certain team-building and bonding away days when nobody has actually said anything.
...boof...
...and somehow accountability becomes hot air.
You know the moment.
The trust exercise has finished.
The flipcharts are full.
Somebody has successfully built a bridge out of drinking straws.
Everybody has discovered they're apparently an INTJ.
Or a high D.
Or whatever Myers-Briggs and DISC decided before lunch.
Nothing has actually changed.
Away days have an extraordinary talent for creating the appearance of progress.
For several carefully managed hours, every problem seems solvable.
People who haven't spoken for months suddenly discuss communication and become bosom buddies.
Departments that rarely cooperate are encouraged to build towers out of marshmallows instead.
The coffee is excellent.
The pastries disappear remarkably quickly.
Optimism, meanwhile, arrives in industrial quantities.
There is usually a facilitator.
They have colourful pens.
An endless supply of sticky notes.
Enough flipcharts to wallpaper the room.
Apparently, today's mission is organisational transformation.
"Right everyone... you've got 60 seconds."
Apparently that's all it takes.
Each table gets some dried spaghetti.
A handful of marshmallows.
And a challenge to build the tallest tower.
Half the room starts building.
The other half starts eating the marshmallows.
Then the organiser casually says,
"Oh... they've been in my cupboard since last year's away day."
...boof...
The atmosphere changes immediately.
Funny how trust can disappear in under a minute.
Meanwhile...
The printer still hasn't worked properly since last October.
Nobody mentions that.
Every table eventually agrees on the same things.
Communication.
Trust.
Collaboration.
Respect.
Capacity.
Curiously, these ideas never seem particularly controversial, until you hear somebody say,
"I've no capacity."
Implementing them on Monday morning...
That's where things become more interesting.
The lanyards come off.
The name badges disappear into desk drawers or just straight in the bin.
The flipcharts are photographed for future reference.
The photographs are never referenced again.
Everyone drives home convinced something important happened.
Until about 9:15 on Monday morning.
By nine thirty, somebody has already replied-all to an email that never needed replying to.
By ten o'clock, two departments have resumed blaming one another for exactly the same problem discussed three days earlier.
By lunchtime, the bridge made from drinking straws remains the most successful piece of collaboration produced all week, beating the spaghetti contraption.
Culture has never been built by hotel conference rooms.
Or internal meeting rooms when budgets are tight.
Nor by discovering Karen from Finance is apparently an otter-sloth.
And it's definitely not by trust falls.
You know the ones...
The "You better catch me, bitch." trust falls.
"Right then..."
"On three..."
"Just fall backwards."
"Your colleagues will catch you."
...boo-doopf...
Well...
That answered that.
She wasn't particularly popular then.
That's one way of finding out who's a friend.
Who's a colleague.
And who's just a demon.
It is built quietly.
Repeatedly.
Patiently.
Usually by people who never volunteer to stand at the front with a microphone.
Real change rarely announces itself.
It doesn't arrive with branded notebooks.
Or personality tests.
Or motivational slogans.
It arrives when people behave differently after the event has ended.
That's considerably harder to organise than an away day.
After all...
People arrived carrying the same things they had on Friday.
Problems.
Drama.
Politics.
Capacity.
They left carrying something different.
A lanyard.
A glass of wine.
The difficult things were still waiting back at the office.
Observation
A day away from the office rarely fixes what happens inside it.
Featured Tee
Everyone Has Style. Not All Have Presence.