The Sandstone Team Building Blog

My colleagues rarely trust me with blog entries at all, let alone the coveted team building event of the month entry.  But I pushed my case for this one and somehow won the day.  In my role as a specialist, I get to handle quite a bit of the out and out fun elements of our activities.  For Romanbar, the activity at the heart of my selection for August, I run the bar flair sessions, teaching people the tricks that Tom Cruise got up to in the film Cocktail.  If the group is a large one, say over 150 people, I might not have the time to do anything else.  The smaller the group, the more elements I can get involved in.

The event I have chosen was held at the Swissotel “The Howard”, close to the banks of the Thames.  We are often fortunate to have really good contacts at our venues and the Howard ranks amongst the best for customer service we have experienced anywhere.  So we were in a good mood before we took over the afternoon for our clients, but we weren’t sure about our participants.  We knew that they had been engaged for a day and a half already in difficult and demanding business sessions and hoped that we could lighten the mood, as it were, quickly.  They were a small group – only 8 participants – and that can be challenging too.

But we needn’t have worried on either count.  Each and every one of them got into the activity immediately.  They were well on top of the business decision making that is such an important part of Romanbar, but they also threw themselves into the more fun tasks.  Our Karaoke machine may have heard better singers (sorry team) over the years, but it has never heard more dedicated team players doing their bit for their bars.  Fantastic fun!

Come the cheese rolling race in the grand finale, the noise levels peaked and the result was hotly disputed.  We made the decision, of course, and later analysis of the video taken of the race proved us correct.  Phew!

Although I’m never trusted with handling the debriefing session – even I admit it isn’t my forte – I do enjoy watching and listening in on a good one.  And this seemed to me one of the best.  They really got into the debrief and uncovered plenty of instances of how Romanbar had mirrored real life for them.  They focused on those aspects that were most important to them and came up with an action plan that sounded to me a pretty good one.  If they throw themselves into that the way they did into bar flair, they’ll certainly see improvements in their team effectiveness, I’m sure.

I enjoyed writing this.  I might try and sneak in another event of the month soon…

Steve