The Sandstone Team Building Blog

I’m delighted to announce that our colleague Jo is having another baby.  Since number one came along at the beginning of last year, she has revelled in motherhood.  Clearly, so much so that she thought she would double the revelling.  So all of our congratulations here to Jo, husband Trev and soon to be big sister Frankie.

We’re thinking that maybe we should add a new team building activity themed to follow Jo’s lead.  “Crèche Wars” has a nice ring to it.  Or maybe “Babysitters Inc.” in which teams compete to earn lucrative babysitting assignments by showing off their nappy changing skills.  Perhaps that’s over the top and we should just add “Pram Races” as a prize cube task in Cube…

I reckon that we’ll settle for knowing we’ll soon have a new addition to our extended family.

Nikki

We are delighted to announce one brand new international team building partner and some very positive changes within another.  The SBC Group, based in Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has spawned a brand new team building company that is committed to using Sandstone team building activities with their group’s impressive client base and new clients alike.  In the US, our long time partner Fusion Associates has been bought out by a much larger group of companies and has been reinvigorated by the change and given significantly greater strength in depth.  Both SBC and Fusion Associates will shortly be undertaking large marketing campaigns to promote our offerings in their respective markets.  Details of all of our international colleagues can be found on our International Partners and Associates page.  As you will read, Sandstone Partners have full access to all of our team building activities and are fully trained to deliver these activities. Our Associates have full access to our team building activities and are supported by the Sandstone team in their delivery. In all other regions of the world, we deliver our events from our UK base.  We have recently run events from our UK base in such places as Algeria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, Malaysia, Norway, and Sweden.  To see where we have run events recently in the UK, click here.

Alan

Ok.  There is.  I lied.  The first 3 letters are the give-away, of course.  It’s a real struggle to come up with a good name for a blog entry, so give me some leeway!  Now all I have to do is show some relevance to the title in what I write.  Here goes…

I expect there’s a good chance that, like me, you are fed up of hearing “There’s no ‘I’ in team”.  And the almost as ubiquitous retort “Ah, but there is a ‘me’”.  Leadership by sloganising is not one of the recommendations we make to our client groups here at Sandstone.  In fact, we generally don’t make recommendations at all.  Each of our team activities has a structured debriefing process associated with it that facilitates maximum learning from the time and effort (not to mention money!) by then spent during the event.  Our approach to debriefing helps teams and individuals extract the learning for themselves, with our facilitators adding the odd nudge and the odd word of wisdom by way of ensuring that predefined objectives are adequately covered and met.  It is always more powerful when teams and individuals can generate the learning for themselves, rather than being simply told what they should take away.

Such a debrief isn’t compulsory and we often run our activities purely for the fun (did I mention how much fun people have?), but we have noticed that, in these challenging economic times, a much higher percentage of our events now include a sizeable debrief.  Clearly, maximising what a client gets out of a given budget has become more important.  Rightly so.

Indeed, it’s interesting for us to note that at a time when many companies in our industry are scaling back – in fact one or two have gone under – we are growing in strength.  Our learning and development background is reflected in all of our activities and this has made us even more popular with clients in all sectors and with client groups of all levels, shapes and sizes as the economic slowdown has taken a grip.

For the record, I don’t even drink tea.  But I am a team player, so maybe my blog title has some truth to it after all!

Nikki

It’s that time once again where we like to tell you about our event of the month.  As normal, it’s a hard decision – there are always things in every event we run that makes me want to choose them.  This time though I have chosen a Wild West event we ran in Manchester.  We were working in the middle of a park, which has some lovely grounds.  We were all keeping our fingers crossed for some nice weather so the group could make the most of them!  Whilst it wasn’t as sunny as the weather forecast had predicted, it was most certainly nice and warm enough, albeit a bit blowy at times.

Whilst the group didn’t know the ins and outs of the day beforehand, they did know the day had a Wild West theme and everyone made an effort – jeans, striped shirts and fancy hats were the order of the day and someone even brought his own holster!  The organisation concerned also opted for cowboy hats and bandannas for all which added nicely to the feel of the day.  Everyone put them straight on and the group really looked the part.

Everyone also got into the activity straight away, with Line Dancing and Gun Slinging being amongst the firm favourites of the day.  The usual getting into character by trying to bribe our team to give the teams extra hints, tips and answers happened sooner than usual also, but we stood fast and didn’t give in.  Well, none of them were prepared to stump up the thousand pounds each that is our normal minimum acceptable bribe…

The teams worked well – both within each team and across teams for the collaborative aspects of the day.  One particular instance which stands out is when a member of one team joined another so they had enough people available to take part in the Rail Road heats – and he helped them to victory!  A great example of working together, if ever I saw one.

My favourite moment though was when our main contact on the day hugged our lead facilitator, Nikki, as a thank you for our efforts both before and during the event.  We had not only met, but (and I have to say as usual) exceeded the client’s expectations.  And hugs are always welcome…

Yee-haw!!!!!!!!

Paul