A few years ago, my life was in the Middle East and specifically Dubai. Gunnar, the CEO of the company I was working for at the time was a very outdoorsy and adventurous person. He was the kind of person who would enjoy his weekend driving his modified 4X4 vehicle to the middle of the desert with his family and setting up camp for a couple of nights.
Gunnar's modified 4x4 on a Camping Trip
I was already working for the company before he was appointed CEO and so I was used to a certain way of doing things. With him at the head, a lot of things changed. His vision was that team work is a really important factor to the success of a company. In order to work as a team, he made sure all the employees knew each other's personality. This allowed us to understand our individual strengths and weaknesses and how best to interact between us based on that knowledge.
The company was growing fast at the time and so every year there were a lot of new employees joining the team. He came up with a good way to introduce them to the company culture and work ethics. At least for me it was a good way, but I could definitely understand somebody disagreeing with me and telling me it was hell. 🙂
The idea was that every new employee in the company within the last working year would first attend a morning seminar about finding his/her own personality color (Check it here to understand what these colors are) and then spend the afternoon participating in different activities as part of a team. The day would end with the same teams racing at night in the desert. The first year, he ran the concept with the whole company, so everyone got to participate and experience it.
At the end of the morning seminar, once everyone got to know his/her own personality color, teams of 5-6 people were created. Each group was composed of a mix of personality colors. The same afternoon, these teams competed in different activities which forced the players to cooperate and work together to achieve success and get ahead of the competition.
At the end of the day, they were all taken by bus to the middle of the desert where Gunnar was waiting for them with fellow desert drivers and their cars. By then it was night time and pitch-black already.
How does running through the dunes at night in the desert while being chased by cars sound like to you?
For me, being a bit adventurous myself, it was, "Hell yeah!, Bring it on!". Some of my colleagues shared my opinion but for others (maybe the majority actually), it was "WHAAAAATTTTT??? Are you crazy? No way! What the F**** is this? I'm not doing this"
The rules were simple. Each team was given a GPS with 3 pre-recorded sets of coordinates. These were the waypoints that each team had to go through in order to collect stamps. There was about 1km to 1.5km between each waypoints, but considering the fact that you are in the desert with high dunes in the middle of the night, it makes the distance much longer. Each team had to collect all the stamps and make it back to the starting point as quickly as possible in order to win.
However, it wasn't that simple. This is where the cars come in. Ten minutes after the teams left the starting point, the cars (three or 4 of them) started chasing them. Each car had 1 driver and 1 runner. Their goal was to find the teams and for the runner to tag one of the members in order to inflict a time penalty on that team. This penalty was then added to their overall time. This obviously meant that the teams had to progress fast while not being seen. The advantage they had though is that the drivers only had headlights, so they couldn't see much on the sides.
They would however, once in a while stop and turn off the engine to listen and pinpoint the noisy teams. The desert is so quiet at night that any sound can easily be heard.
Once tagged, a team was given a 10-minute head start for a chance to escape and hide again in the dunes.
You're probably wondering where the team work is in all of this. Well, it's simple, you see, each team was composed of athletic people who could run fast and complete the course quickly as well as the complete opposite couch potatoes who were not in their best shape, thus quite slow. So this meant that the team members had to find a compromise and work together to hide and not get caught by the cars, not get injured and not waste too much time.
Once all the teams were back to the starting point, the race times and penalties were tallied and the winners were announced.
There were definitely mixed reactions at the end of the exercise. Some of the participants (like myself 🙂) were elated and happy to have participated while others were clearly upset and angry. There were laughter and tears but what was clearly noticeable was how people from the same personality color would tend to react the same way.
This clearly shows how understanding your colleagues' personalities and how to interact with them can play a big role in the way the company grows.
Would you participate in such an unusual exercise/activity?