There's no "Ow!" in "team"

[muckefuck]

monshu warned me yesterday that he'll be home late two days this week because of mandatory "team building" at work. "I just hope it isn't gimmicky," he confided.

"What kind of team building is there that isn't gimmicky? I honestly can't think of anything."

Anyone?

To tell the truth, the term "team building" always makes me snigger. In our RPGs, this was a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for "singling out one of the members and beating the snot out of him". Sadly, the consultant his boss has hired is highly unlikely to share that definition.

Comments

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

The only kind of non-gimmicky team building exercise I've ever experienced was a group project that cleared a series of hurdles for a project and was able to regroup and use those insights for the next several projects, to make it suck less. This in my professional experience has only ever happened twice in two different work environments. Generally, your definition of longstanding (e.g. lord of the flies) usually at the cost of denying a genuine problem that eventually kills the group or organization in question - that's what I am used to seeing.