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the Ultimate
teamBuilding Event :: mini-Eco Challenge |
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The Mini Eco- Challenge is an excellent way to empower
teams, identify hidden skills and strengthen
the bond between members.
Read
what Business Week has to say about the Mini Eco- Challenge
Seagate Technology has put on for the past 6 years.
This article written by Sara Max appeared in the April
3, 2006, issue of Business Week magazine.
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Seagate's
Morale-athon:
Inside the tech giant's team building blowout in New
Zealand. Plenty of companies try to motivate the troops,
but few go as far as Seagate Technology (STX ). In February
the $9.8 billion maker of computer storage hardware
flew 200 staffers to New Zealand for its sixth annual
Eco Seagate -- an intense week of team-building topped
off by an all-day race in which Seagaters had to kayak,
hike, bike, swim, and rappel down a cliff. The tab?
$9,000 per person. Correspondent Sarah Max went along
for the bonding.
SUNDAY "DON'T BE TOO COOL
TO PARTICIPATE."
It's cocktail hour, and nervous getting-to-know-you
chatter floats around the Queenstown chalet, where we've
arrived by gondola. Staffers from a dozen countries
are talking and gazing out at a stupendous mountain
view of The Remarkables. The employees been chosen from
1,200 who tried to get into Eco Seagate. (The company
employs a total of 45,000.)
There are no age limits: The oldest
racer this year is 62. In the first of many embarrassing
exercises, four "tribes," each made up of
10 athletically, regionally, and operationally diverse
teams, are asked to imitate the sound of the New Zealand
birds for which their group has been named: Ruru, Kia,
Tui, or Weka. "You're going to think some of this
is pretty dumb," CEO Bill Watkins tells the crowd.
"Just get involved. Don't be too cool to participate."
This event, or social experiment, is Watkins' pet project.
He dreamed up Eco Seagate as a way to break down barriers,
boost confidence, and, yes, make staffers better team
players. "Some of you will learn about teamwork
because you have a great team," he says. "Some
of you will learn because your team is a disaster."
Watkins, whose company is the world's biggest maker
of hard drives, knows about disastrous teams. When Seagate
acquired his employer, Conner Peripherals, in 1996,
hostility reigned as staffers jockeyed to guard their
turf. "Corporate culture is the story of the company,
" says Watkins. "Back then, Seagate had lots
of great stories -- about people getting fired. We needed
to create a different culture -- one that was open,
honest, and encouraged people to work together."
So how do you reprogram employees? You ask them to do
something they've never done before, says Watkins, who
took up adventure racing in the late 1990s and saw it
as the perfect way to teach team-building. "You
put them in an environment where they have to ask for
help."
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MONDAY
BOOT CAMP IT AIN'T.
"Oh,
what a beautiful morning. Oh, what a beautiful day,"
croons Malcolm McLeod of Australia's Motivation
Worldwide. "Now get out there and stretch."
Dressed in referee garb, Malcolm and his gang of "stripies"
have helped Eco Seagate run smoothly since the first one
in 2000. Over the years the outing has evolved from just
a race to a tightly organized event with a streamlined
message.
Each morning, Watkins or one of his top executives gives
a presentation on a key attribute of a strong team, such
as trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability.
That lesson carries over to the afternoon, when tribes
go off to learn orienteering, rappelling, mountain biking,
or kayaking.
Today we're up at 5:45 for the "optional" pre-dawn
stretch. But this isn't exactly boot camp. For Eco Seagate
the company has taken over Rydges Lakeland Resort in Queenstown,
a mountain village on the South Island. All participants
have their own comfy rooms.
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The stretch takes place in a park across the street. Seagate
CFO Charles Pope, 50, and his Shark Attack team are among
the throng bending and groaning in the dark. "I don't
like to schmooze for the sake of schmoozing," says
Pope, who was initially opposed to the event because,
for one thing, it costs a lot of money -- about $1.8 million
this year. That's a lot of hard drives. But it represents
a fraction of the company's $40 million training-and-development
budget.
In 2002, Pope caved in to Watkins' pleas to participate
and came home a believer. Now, he says, Eco Seagate is
one of the last things he'd cut from the budget. A lot
of other companies might agree. While it's tough to find
numbers for team-building events, partly because they're
hard to define (a treasure hunt at a museum? a day at
Disney World?), the business is growing fast, says Peter
Grazier of Teambuilding Inc. in Chadds Ford, Pa.
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In the afternoon,
the tribes head out for physical training. I'm "embedded"
with the Rurus, who today will learn the most essential
but least exciting skill of adventure racing -- navigation
-- in the rolling hills overlooking Lake Wakatipu.
The Five Elements team has done some team-building already:
"We've been e-mailing almost every day since we got
matched up," says Karri Barry, 37, a cash manager
in Scotts Valley, Calif., where Seagate is headquartered.
When the team gets maps and compasses today, they know
that Choon Keong "C.K." Neo, 33, a quality manager
in Singapore, will be the navigator, thanks to a stretch
in his nation's military.
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TUESDAY
TESTING THE LIMITS.
Watkins is pacing the stage of the hotel conference room,
giving his morning pep talk. The speech: unscripted and
emotional. The look: shaggy hair, cargo shorts, and trail-running
shoes. Today he's wearing a backpack with the head of
a large toy kiwi bird sticking out the top.
Yesterday each team was given one of these stuffed animals,
its "sixth team member," and warned that one
person must be in physical contact with it at all times.
Many teams have strapped on the birds, dressed them, and
even named them. Anyone caught without a bird will lose
15 green Eco tokens, which teams earn throughout the week
and will use on race day to buy better maps, skip a checkpoint,
or take a bridge over a frigid, fast-moving river.
At the rappel site, Pope's teammate Tish Sanchez earns
an extra token for volunteering to rappel off a bridge,
her fear of heights be damned. The climbing instructors
stay close. Still, Sanchez has to step out over the ledge
and hang her life on a harness. "You can do it, Tish,"
says Pope encouragingly, standing on the bridge and looking
down at his white-faced teammate. It's slow going at first,
but halfway down, the usually reserved info tech manager
starts yelling out: "Whoo-hoo!"
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WEDNESDAY
"SEAGATE IS POWERFUL. SEAGATE IS POWERFUL."
Wearing war paint, headbands, and makeshift grass skirts,
each tribe is performing its own uniquely choreographed
haka -- a Maori chant typically performed by native New
Zealanders -- in a competition worth 50 tokens to the
winning tribe, as judged by a panel of Maoris.
The chant -- "Moanaketi roopu kaha. Moanaketi roopu
kaha" -- is said to mean: "Seagate is powerful.
Seagate is powerful." But it could just convey: "What
a bunch of nutcases."
"For me the race
is anticlimactic," says COO David Wickersham, 49.
"You learn so much about yourself in the first four
days and, personally, I'm surprised by how people let
their guard down." Tonight there's no question that
people have shed their inhibitions. They've also shed
some of their clothing: The men are shirtless, the women
sport bathing suits and tank tops with skirts improvised
from fabric of their team's color. There's a lot of chummy
touching, though no canoodling that I can see.
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But does all this
expensive inhibition-ditching do anything for shareholders?
Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior
at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business,
says that while you can't measure the effect, companies
with a "positive culture" probably outperform
their peers. Of course, he adds, the underlying ethic
has to live on after something like Eco Seagate. "If
I send you off to an event and you go home and are treated
like dog doo, it doesn't work."
THURSDAY
"THE HARDEST YET"
"How
much water will there be on the course?" "Will
we have wet suits?" "Did you say this could
take us 10 hours?" The night before the big test,
Nathan Faavae, an adventure-racing superstar, is being
bombarded with questions. He spent months studying maps
and bushwhacking around Queenstown to design the course.
"This will be the hardest Eco Seagate yet,"
says Faavae, who's a first-timer but tested the course
with several veterans. He hands out bags filled with a
map, jerseys, life jackets, and a radio.
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FRIDAY
TIME TO WALK THE WALK -- AND SWIM THE SWIM.
Here's the plan: The 40 teams are dropped on an island
in the middle of Lake Wakatipu between 6 and 7 a.m. A
conch sounds, and the teams race to their kayaks and paddle
1.5 miles to shore. Then, navigating with a compass, they
trek over 4.3 miles of hilly terrain, mountain-bike 10.5
miles of rocks and ruts, then rappel 160 feet into a canyon
for a hypothermic swim and hike.
Here's the reality: a ragged day of pain and suffering.
After a slow start on the kayak, Five Elements runs past
20 teams on the hike, jumps on bikes, and pedals like
mad to second place. "This pace is feeling a little
leisurely," jokes Stuart Brown, 44, a program manager
from Shakopee, Minn. Everyone laughs and speeds up. But
an hour later they start to climb the big hill. |
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"Help me!"
Engineer Kebiao Yuan, 41, is straddling his bike, so cramped
he can't move. His teammates lift his leg over the bike,
rub his knotted muscles, and squeeze a pack of sickeningly
sweet energy gel into his mouth. Soon he's back on his
machine, and Five Elements enters the final stretch of
the bike leg.
At the next transition point they ditch the bikes, run
to the rim of a canyon, and rappel down. Then it's a 1.6-mile
trek out, partly wading, partly swimming in 50F water.
Too cold to feel anything at all, Five Elements crosses
the finish line 5 hours and 51 minutes after the start
-- 27 minutes after the first-place team, Fuel, and four
hours before the stragglers.
At the finish line they find portable showers, dry clothes,
and tables laden with grilled meats and salads. Miraculously,
all 40 teams make it, carrying their silly kiwi birds.
I hang out near the beer, certain that exhausted Seagaters
will have some critical things to say about Watkins' cockamamie
event. Instead they gush about how they loved it. Then
I recall CFO Pope's note of hard-headed realism. "I
consider this an investment," he told me before the
race, remarking that he'd soon e-mail all staffers in
his organization and ask what they'd do differently as
a result of Eco Seagate. "After all," he adds,
"it isn't a vacation."
This article by Sara Max appeared in the April 3, 2006,
issue of Business Week magazine. Photos from motivation
worldwide. Contact
Mww for more information |
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Queenstown, New Zealand mini Eco-Challenge. Motivation
ww can create an event at any desired location.
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