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Teambuilding Triumph: Whatever Floats Your Corporate Boat
April 24, 2008
What do your organization and a sinking ship have in common? Hopefully not much. But building a boat together is a way to teach employees the teambuilding skills your company needs to stay afloat.
By Paul Donnelly
Modern commerce is virtually virtual. Management communicates across the globe through rapidly advancing technology, with workers rarely standing arms-length from each other, picking something up together, and shaping it into what they want. So the Alexandria Seaport Foundation invented the Corporate Team Boatbuilding Challenge, a tool for corporate managers who need to ensure teams are productive, disciplined, innovative, and coordinated. It can be an in-depth, phased exercise, or a way to build trust, commitment, and shared pride in a few hours at a company picnic or retreat.
Last fall, four independent teams from aviation and aerospace, road building, bridge construction, woodworking, and other industries built four 16' Challenge Wherry boats in five hours on the waterfront in Alexandria, VA. The teams started with pre-cut pieces of spruce, fir, oak, and marine plywood made of African mahogany; a set of instructions; and all the tools, glues, bronze nails, and screws necessary.
"I don't think I'll quit my day job; I'll tell you that," laughed Steve Perkins, Northrop Grumman IT's vice president for Washington Operations. "We're all managers, a virtual team, but we've never worked together like this," he added, gesturing at his high-tech colleagues grappling with the low tech problems of building a wooden boat the old-fashioned way. "I don't think any of us has lifted a power or hand tool in years. It's fun and productive doing something new in a way that will help us in our real work."
The Alexandria Seaport Foundation precuts all materials and provides all tools, as well as apprentices and experienced boatwrights to help corporate teams compete safely, but sometimes the problems can be pretty basic. Keith Cook watched his Shirley Construction company team carefully apply marine sealant to a piece of white oak. "That's not going to leak there," he said, a little too decisively. Why not, is what the guy applying the sealant wanted to know: "Because that's the top. This is the bottom. If there's water getting in there, we've already sunk."
Professional observers watched carefully with detailed checklists, noting how construction teams handled the adversity of unfamiliar assignments, undefined roles, and strange information. "Did he say something about spreading the spooge?" asked Matt Queen, who ordinarily handles congressional relations for the multibillion-dollar corporation, but was now holding a small stick covered with spooge, a marine sealant.
The Challenge Wherry is a 16' long flat-bottomed rowboat, shaped similar to a canoe, with three seats for someone to row amidships, and as many as two paddlers, fore and aft. To build one, it's necessary to measure, plan, follow directions, drill, glue, bend, nail, plane, and sand. Many of these tasks, not surprisingly, require teamwork to successfully complete.
No one on any of the corporate teams had ever built a boat before. Starting out slowly, the general enthusiasm of Northrop Grumman team members became a concerted, coordinated effort. A key turn came early, and was entirely spontaneous: Steve Perkins, the most senior of the team, was leading a small group seeking to nail the stem, the long piece that forms the bow, to the long pieces of plywood that are the boat’s sides. The group used a rope to pull the two sides together in an approximation of the graceful curve of the finished boat, and had applied plenty of spooge to the stem. But standing near the stern Carol Brown, Northrop Grumman's director of strategic alliances, whose department is under Perkins, noticed: "They've pulled the sides too close together, haven't they?" Reading the instructions again, while watching the bow group, Brown said: "They have to use this, the, uh, bucking iron, to hold against where they're going to nail, right? They don't have enough room." Then she went for a closer look.
A few moments later, the rope was loosened to give Perkins room to hold the stack of lead window weights (the bucking iron) against the inside of the stem while one of his colleagues drove bronze ring nails into it through the marine plywood side. Brown came back beaming to the Seaport Foundation volunteers: "They had to loosen it up," she said. Larry Huffman, a retired diplomat who has helped build hundreds of boats, asked gently if she had told her boss the problem, or let him find it out on his own: "That's what the exercise is for, remember."
The management team evaluation distributed after the event included a checklist asking whether a leader had clearly emerged; if the groups functioned on a consensus basis; if there were any disagreements about how to proceed, and if so, how they were resolved; whether each team started by reading the instructions (and if so, whether each member read all of them); how the teams functioned together to create a tone or culture for their work (fun, cooperative, etc.); and how and who on each team consulted the directions at key points, then communicated, like Northrup Grumman’s Brown, when something was needed.
For a more in-depth version of the exercise, individuals could be assigned to teams according to how management wanted to mesh, say, marketing and IT, or legal and engineering, perhaps the CEO and the truck drivers. Key personnel could be taken away, or added. Materials and tools could be manipulated to force innovation and coordination. Some companies will want to have different teams challenged in different ways. If the corporate staff has just one hammer, but dozens of measuring devices, you could provide the loading dock crew with lots of hammers, and no way to measure anything, thereby creating opportunities for cooperative, situational problem-solving.
Mike Wilson, a Seaport Foundation instructor, a U.S. Marine with extensive combat experience, watched the teams closely. "Now, this team here, they had no real leader, but they were all generally familiar with construction, and had an almost intuitive sense of the task. But they started too fast, it took them longer to get oriented, and I never saw anybody reading ahead in the instructions. They lacked a sense of the overall task. That one there, they started out with a leader, and they took the hierarchy from the corporation, and just transplanted it to building the boat, but that didn't work too well because they had to work together in a different way, and it turned out that everybody was equal. They almost had to reinvent themselves, and look how well they were working together by the end."
The competition started at 8:30 a.m., with all boats ready and floating easily on the Potomac by 2:30 p.m. The winning company, Shirley Construction, was pleased with the results. "We'll be back next year," said Kelly Gurwell, Shirley's director of human resources. "I know lots of guys who will want to do this, and see if they can beat these guys, building and racing it. We’re competitive."
Shirley got the race prize, but Northrop Grumman got the teamwork award. "They really came together," said Wilson. "Those of us watching could see a big improvement from where they started, with some maybe a bit tentative at first, not sure of the task or how to work together. But that's what this exercise is all about, it's about building a team."
Paul Donnelly is a professional writer and political consultant who has volunteered at the Alexandria Seaport Foundation, along with his son Matt, for several years. To learn more about the Team Boatbuilding Challenge or the Seaport Foundation's work redirecting at-risk youth, visit http://www.alexandriaseaport.org.
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