We all too often hear about the success of team building events.
What about the team activities that end in disaster?
Here are my personal favourites!
Team Building Hijacking
Angling for a more memorable team-building exercise, Ericsson Telecom Company decided to stage a hijacking. Two men with masks and weapons seized a coach load of Ericsson’s unbeknown sales team.
The goal was to see how staff kept their cool under stress.
Sadly the ‘performance’ was cut short when a meddling passerby called the police. A spokesperson for Ericsson described how “unfortunate” this was. “The mistake was not giving notice to the police”.
Argh yes that was the mistake with this team building adventure!
Team Building Firewalking
Eagle Star Insurance had employees walk across a bed of hot coals as part of a team building activity day.
More than half of the employees ended up with burns on their feet; two severe enough to warrant an overnight hospital stay.
More confusing than why management thought firewalking would promote teamwork is that employees continued to walk on coals having seen their colleagues being burned!
Eagle Star now sticks to more conventional team building activities.
Team Building Waterboarding
An American based telemarketing company waterboarded one of its employees as a team building exercise in 2008.
Presumably bored with traditional team events, bosses decided that waterboarding, a centuries old torture method where water is poured over prisoners’ faces to stimulate drowning, was the new team building fad.
The manager who ran the ‘motivational’ exercise told staff that he wanted them to work as hard at selling as the waterboarded employee did at breathing!
Team Building Trust Activities
This brilliantly funny American Airlines advert has a little dig at trust based team building exercises. Have a look and see yet more examples of team building gone horribly wrong!
