You’re perched atop a 40-foot pole. Your heart is pounding and your palms are sweaty from nerves.
In your mind, you wonder whether you can actually reach that trapeze you’re supposed to jump seven feet up in the air to catch. More than that, you’re thinking you’re a wee bit insane for being up there in the first place.
Whose idea was this? Your company’s.
On the ground, your teammates,also known as your co-workers,are cheering you on. Do you have any other choice but to jump?
This ain’t Disneyland, to be sure.
Call it extreme team building. It’s a new take on corporate training designed to help managers work better together in their daily routines. And it’s just the thing for execs who don’t get enough excitement during the workday.
Advocates say trapeze swinging, pole climbing and other unorthodox exercises help companies develop, maintain and keep their executive workforces happy.
Newport Beach-based Coast Challenge runs a program that’s part ropes challenge course, part corporate field trip. It was started by Aileen Feuerberg and Claudia Jennings. The operation is a subsidiary of the duo’s event management company, Corporate Diversions.
Coast Challenge’s three-acre “corporate learning center,” surrounded by a lemon orchard, neighing horses, sycamore trees and oaks, opened last month in San Juan Capistrano at the Oaks/Blenheim Exhibition and Equestrian Center. The company leases the park per event.
This year, Coast Challenge expects to do 60 events and double that next year, officials said. They anticipate $1.5 million in sales this year. The company employs six administrative employees and 15 “facilitators,” who guide corporate teams through the various activities.
Feuerberg said companies are coming to her to help integrate workforces coupled together in mergers. Others come to the company to get their executives working at “Internet speed,” she said, which requires they get to know each other quickly.
Colleen Edwards, director of marketing and communications for Newport Beach-based IPNet Solutions Inc., attended Coast Challenge’s grand opening event and was hooked.
“We’re growing like crazy,” she said. “So as new team members come on board it’s important for us to ramp up fast,to like each other, to trust each other.”
And gathering in an outdoor environment that is physically and intellectually stimulating makes it easier to develop relationships. “Besides relationship building, it’s fun,” she said.
Coast Challenge’s outdoor “experiential learning” adventure is effective for developing speedy rapport because it demands interaction and cooperation, she said.
After each activity, team members are “debriefed” in that they review and reflect on what they learned. Experiential learning, as opposed to say, classroom-style learning, requires physical participation. Here’s how they put it on Coast Challenge’s Web site: “An hour of play is worth a year of conversation.”
The course consists of nine “high elements.” Those are events like the rock-climbing wall and the “high commitment wire,” a highwire walk with the safety of a harness and helmet.
But the high elements are high enough off the ground to scare you out of your “comfort zone.”
Then there are the low elements, where both feet are on the ground. They encourage strategy and teamwork. Take “the muse.” It involves cement stubs and three boards. The object is to get the team from one side to the other without stepping on the ground.
Usually a leader emerges, and sometimes it’s not who you would expect, Jennings said.
“Very shy people really open up out here,” she said.
Then there are those who are aggressive on the job, but timid on the high wire. For the leader who continues to be dominant on the course, he or she can be blindfolded and muted, Jennings said.
So what happened to the getting together with co-workers over lunch? The risk-taking adventure beats lunch, say those who’ve been through it.
“It teaches you to face challenges. But it’s also a lot of fun. People really open up,” said Joe Cruz, account manager for Genuity Inc., an Internet service unit spinning off from GTE Corp. with a local office in Newport Beach. About 45 people from Genuity’s district offices have signed up for the ropes challenge course.
Sales folks from satellite TV company EchoStar Communications Corp.’s local office are signed up for the ropes challenge course. They’re coming out just to let off steam, Feuerberg said.
But this kind of teambuilding is not cheap. It costs between $125 to $300 per person for four or eight hour time slots.
Edwards of IPNet Solutions said it’s worth it. She’s including two future senior management and sales force bonding outings in her “strategy” budget. Genuity uses funds from its “teambuilding” budget.
Diane Soma, client services manager for Santa Ana-based Option One Mortgage Corp.’s information technology department, is considering Coast Challenge. And it’s not the only game in town. Encinitas-based Aquarius Training and Development has offered similar team-building activities at the Hyatt Newporter for the past several years. But she isn’t so sure the long-term value will outweigh the cost.
“In concept it sounds like it would be great,” Soma said. “But how do you sustain the value?”
The value is in newly formed relationships co-workers take back to the office, the Coast Challenge partners contend. “They have a different type of relationship after they’re finished,” Jennings said.
