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Adventures in Change
Companies turn to physical challenges to help workers learn to function as a team
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Business New Haven
6/18/2001
By: Mimi Houston
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Last October, on one of those crisp but balmy sunny days that make New England unforgettable, Nancy Margiano, director of sales training for PFP Insurance of Orange, was sailing on Long Island Sound. A gentle salt breeze was blowing and the water glidstened blue all around her. It was a weekday, but she wasn't playing hooky. Her boss knew exactly where she was. In fact, she was actually hard at work.
“We were out sailing as part of a two day seminar on teambuilding,” explains Margiano. “We had about 28 people - managers from all over the country.”
Margiano and her fellow employees were sailing the 91-foot schooner Quinnipiack, the gracious tan-bark-sailed vessel that has become a familiar site along the New Haven coastline. They were participating in a program called “Three Hours before the Mast.”
“Going before the mast was a person's introduction to life as a sailor,” explains Christopher Newlan, education director for Schooner Sound Learning in New Haven.
“Adjusting to routines and procedures, learning to lead and follow - but most of all learning to 'pull' together with shipmates - took first priority,” he adds.
Newlan says the program is designed to foster teamwork and leadership skills that are transferable to the professional world.
“Participants learn to work together,” he explains, “to achieve a common goal as they struggle through activities that challenge thought and action processes.”
PFP Insurance is just one of the many corporations now participating in a different kind of corporate training program - one that asks of participants physically and mentally challenging tasks. The tasks may not seem business-related at first, but they are designed to foster teamwork, communications, support. What business wouldn't benefit from more of these qualities among workers?
The Schooner program is so successful in the corporate training arena, the group has formed a working partnership with L.E.A.D., a corporate training and development company in West Haven. The company regularly charters the Quinnipiack for its “Sailing to Success” program, which focuses on developing confidence, trust, self-esteem and problem solving.
Whether working with L.E.A.D. charters, or hosting its own team-building program, a day on board the Quinnipiack is designed to open participants to new ways of thinking, new ways of working together in an environment that erases the limits of their typical work-a-day world.
“What we do is designed to overcome problems employees may be having through re-creating an historic event,” adds Beth McCabe, executive director of Schooner Sound Learning. “It's called 'situational play.'”
“There is a specific task to be done. We give the resources and the parameters - I can't tell you more, or I'll give it away,” she laughs. “But there is a connection between what they are doing and their daily professional lives.”
Participants work together to hoist and tack sails, steer the schooner, and live the life of a sailor of days bygone. As participants discover that they must rely on each other to get from point A to point B, the scenarios are monitored by the crew.
“Mainly for safety reasons,” informs McCabe. “So participants won't harm themselves, the vessel or other vessels.
“Participants are not just taken out on a sail - they're working,” McCabe continues. “They're directly involved in sailing the vessel. The idea is to really help create scenarios where they are forced to communicate, to problem-solve. They are put in an environment that they are not familiar with - where you have to use all the resources of the group. Everyone has to be listened to.”
“The staff of Schooner was phenomenal,” recalls Margiano. “We had so much confidence in them. They provided us with applications for our managers to communicate together and to work as a team to find solutions. They set up a little story, and it did relate to the personalities and the way our managers worked.
“The fact that it was off-site was well received by everyone,” adds Margiano. “People were more creative, they spoke up more because it was a different environment. And when we achieved our goal, we felt success as a team.
“You feel like you can do anything - you have absolute support,” she says. “We really found that most of what we do is 80 percent mental and 20 percent physical. Even the very challenging stuff. What I thought was going to be the hardest, wasn't. Just like in real life.”
Gary Mead, an “adventure-based counselor,” hears this all the time. Mead runs corporate seminars on seven or eight training courses all over Connecticut. One of his venues, Prime Climb - an indoor rock climbing facility - is located in Wallingford.
“This is absolutely a growing thing,” says Mead, of companies sending their employees to adventure-based training courses. He works with companies like G.E., Travelers and United Technologies.
“The field is about 50 years old, but the corporate world began embracing it in the '70s, so it's really still in it's infancy,” he says. “Big corporations have been doing this stuff for years.”
But now Mead sees more mid-level corporations, those who once brought in seminar lecturers, getting involved.
Mead runs his courses in a step-stair fashion, beginning with very simple tasks and building up to more and more physically and mentally challenging ones. But he stresses complete safety, every step of the way, and reassures a listener that his course is not for amateur athletes only.
“A lot of people get very nervous about this kind of stuff,” he states. “They'll say, 'I'm so out of shape,' or, 'I'm just not the adventurous type.' But that's not what this is about. This isn't Survivor - it's not about who's bigger, who's badder. I tell each person everyone has some sort of sense of adventure in them. Maybe it's to offer ideas, or support. It's really all about the way you decide to challenge yourself. And we'll help you get there.”
The day begins with various games and activities called “ice-breakers.”
“I'm working with professionals, and a lot of times they'll bring their professional personas -egos about their positions -with them,” says Mead. “We really need to first just relax and level the playing field. There's nothing emotionally or physically traumatic - everyone is just suddenly having fun.
“Then we'll move on to initiatives: puzzles that must be solved as a group. This enforces the idea that we all have value. We all can contribute.”
At this point Mead says he can sense the group support, trust and camaraderie growing.
“Next we'll move onto a trust activity - maybe a trust fall, or a blind trust walk,” he explains. Scenarios requiring low elements come next, leading to the high elements - the final goals of the day.
“It really is a process,” Mead explains. “The goals you set are for you alone. Whether you go all the way up or four steps up, the group is [saying], 'That's a great choice, we're supporting you.'”
By this point he has sensed the group has pulled together and is cohesive. “People feel, 'Hey - I can make the choices I want, and I know the group will support me.'”
Mead says much of the work is done not by the physical activities alone, but in the talks everyone participates in after the activities.
“Everyone is always really impressed by the transformations we see happening throughout the day,” he says. “How we begin to think more creatively, more outside the box. I hear a lot of 'I never thought I could do that,' or 'I never realized that Joe, who sits in the cubicle right next to me, was such a great guy.'
Mead sees a trend in corporations that are picking adventure-based training over the traditional lecture-based seminars most of us may be more familiar with. And he seems to know why the trend is happening.
“It gets results,” he assures, “because it's interactive. You are engaged, you're vested. It's about finding your own strength inside yourself. You are participating on a level you feel comfortable with, but you're definitely being challenged. Everyone has different levels of comfort. And your challenge is to step slightly outside that comfort zone.
Mead stresses the value of adventure-based training for specific problem areas facing businesses, as well as leadership development. Many clients come to him looking for help with employees who can't get along with others. Or corporations will use his programs for executive skill-building. Whatever the reason, Mead is confident his program meets the needs and goes beyond, offering participants much more than can be had through taking notes and listening to even the best motivational speakers.
McCabe agrees. “Sailing is conducive to getting people to work together,” she explains. “You're in a small space, the goals are pretty clear, and you absolutely have to work together. The captain doesn't sail the ship on his own. It takes a whole group of people to hoist a sail.”
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