We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day Whatever happened to getting your head down and doing the damn job? Whatever happened to going bowling in your own time? You want to take some of the crew from work? Well, that’s nice, too. And if a more fruitful professional relationship between a close-knit group of employees is the result, well isn’t that peachy? But really, if we are all big about this, shouldn’t we be able to interact productively without the panacea of fake camaraderie or a day throwing up in a corporate box at the races? Some of the 7/7 bombers went white-water rafting before the event, you know; and what great team players they turned out to be.
– Martin Samuel. I have never suffered a “team building” trip away from the office, thank god (my boss has better things to do).
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Notice how the one category of employees who never, ever go on ‘team building’ courses are human resources staff.
That’s because there are too many opportunities to do something nasty to them. I can think of a number of HR people I would have happily shoved over the side of a raft…
Who cares about team building exercises? Diversity training is where it’s at! (Link NSFW)
A more serious response:
I go to (get sent to) three broad categories of training:
1) Hands-on stuff. Usually involves use-of-force or driving. We don’t bother with ice-breaking exercises. The instructor introduces himself (Hi, I’m so and so, and I spent twenty years in the Navy SEALS, and today I’ll be teaching you how to shoot terrorists in the face) we just introduce ourselves and have our safety briefing.
2) How to actually do our damn job, classroom-style. No ice breaker exercises either. Instead, the instructor just tells us how she’s qualified to teach this material, and it’s like #1 without the safety briefing. (Hi, I’m the District Attorney, and today we’ll be talking about changes to search-and-seizure law over the last year. Yep, qualified. Yep, relevant to the job.)
3) Wanking. Team-building and diversity. The last time I got sent to one of these was 2003, when POST required that every single cop in Colorado was to attend a racial profiling class. Interestingly, that’s the ONLY time POST has ever ordered mandatory continuing education on anything. That one, we did have a horse-shit team-building icebreaker.
Apparently, the fact that we already know not to treat good people like hardened shitheads didn’t get us out of that.
In the environment where, if I walk through a door, I need to know that my partner will go left when I go right so that we can’t be ambushed, these “team building” exercises are worthless. What makes me trust her is that we train together and I know damn well that she knows her job and can handle stress.
In the office environment where none of this happens, all I need is for the rest of the team to tell me what I need to know, answer their phones, and not steal my stuff.
Climbing ropes together until we all cry and have a group hug won’t teach people to run the wall or approach the stopped car from the other side. Nor will it make people return emails in a timely fashion and stay out of my desk. It mostly allows managers to interact with employees outside of work, when said employees want nothing to do with each other or the manager. The comments in the TO article were pretty much spot on.
Then that is what ‘team-building’ in your context should be about. The problem is a lot of incompetent consultants selling ‘the answer’ – otherwise known as generic bullshit.
In the Army we call these non-optional team-building exercises outside of normal duty hours “mandatory fun.”
The last time I was on one of these was in business school. I imagine everyone is familiar with the exercise where you fall back from an elevated position and let others catch you. For a good reason, the instructions involve crossing your arms, grabbing tightly your garment under the arms, and squeezing tightly with the arms – to prevent flailing arms. In the course of that exercise, I got an elbow to the upper lip (barely missing the nose) from a 170 lbs lady. Please, ask me what it did for my trust in that team, and try to make me go on another one. Please.
Plamus,
I know that one well. Someone got the idea to drag a bunch of us to one of those things. The instructor said that we were the first instance of six people ALL refusing to do the fall-backwards thing.
We’re already a team. We know each other. We’d drop each other because we think it would be funny. (It also helps that we, like most people, can distinguish between a time for f***ing off and a time for working together seriously.)
Ian:
That’s what team-building everywhere should be about. When I worked in the private sector, we recognized a good team by the fact that each of us knew our jobs and did them, and each of us would pick up slack when needed. Someone shows up with a fever and we’d send his ass home and cover for him. That kind of thing.
Interesting that, so far, nobody has yet shown up to defend “Mandatory Fun” (thank you SPC Specialist for that term-I like it).
Come on. Isn’t there ANYBODY in the Samizdatosphere who can defend forced karaoke???