Worst team-building ever

Offsites were one thing. A day away from the usual office whatever. So what if all anyone came away with was a slew of rolled up flipchart pages full of items that everyone was going to "execute" to turn the company around? It was still a day out. 

But the teambuilding events? Oh, no. 

Mostly, anyway. 

I didn't so much hate the ones where we took personality tests and walked away with tips on how to get along with our psycho-dynamic opposites. (INTJ, by the way.) But even these could gang a bit agley. At one company, we took a poor man's version of Myers-Briggs where we fell into Blue-Green-Red-Orange color groups. I was a Blue: corporate analytic nerds. All the sales guys were Reds, mostly Flaming Reds. At one point, the Flamers, who were hooting, screaming, and chanting in some weird impromptu bonding excercise, turned on us Blues and started hollering and gesturing about what pussies we were, and how they were thrilled they weren't Blue. (Fast forward, and I could understand how members of the press felt at MAGA rallies.)

There was another one where we all painted our own versions of a Van Gogh sunflower picture. That one was okay. It was actually very interesting to see who did what in terms of trying for exact replication vs. vague use of the same color palette.) 

But I didn't like the team building exercises where we had to write and perform a cheer, make a heliocopter out of Tinker Toys, sit back to back with a colleague and tell them something deeply personal about yourself. And the absolute worst: learn to build trust - hah -  by falling back into a colleague's arms. Ugh on ugh. That one I really despised. 

Team building has increasingly taken a philanthropic turn, with groups signing up to do something charitable or other. 

Like hike up a mountain to raise money for the entirely admirable José Andrés' World Central Kitchen, the outfit that shows up whenever and wherever there's a natural or manmade disaster.

Over the summer, a team from Beazley, an insurance firm, climbed Colorado's 14,230 foot Mt. Shavano. 

This was obviously a voluntary event, as 14,230 feet, while doable in a day, is a pretty strenuous hike. (The only mountain I've ever made it to the top of is Mt. Monadnock in NH, which is only a bit over 3,000 feet high. It only took a couple of hours, and that was plenty enough for me. I've climbed Mt. Washington, but only made it as far as Tuckerman's Ravine. And I've also climbed Mt. Katahdin in Maine, the most strenuous hike I've ever been on, but I don't remember whether we got to the top. We're talking over 50 years ago for all of these treks.)

Anyway, underwriter Steve Stephanides, age 46, was on his second Beazley charity hike, which the company has been holding for more than a decade.

As the team of 15 Beazley-ites neared the summit, Steve decided to take a breather. While he was breathing, his colleagues made it to the peak and started heading down. The 14 all made it to the bottom safely.  Steve forged on and got to the top after his colleagues had exited. On the way down, he realized that something was off.

[He] used his cellphone to pin-drop his location to his co-workers, who informed him that he was on the wrong route and instructed him to hike back up to the summit to get to the correct trail down, rescue officials said in a statement. "In his initial attempts to descend, he found himself in the steep boulder and scree field on the northeast slopes toward Shavano Lake," according to officials. 

Just before 4 p.m. local time on Friday, Stephanides sent another location pin-drop to his colleagues that he was near the correct trail. Shortly after that message, a strong storm passed through the area with freezing rain and high winds, rescue officials said in a statement. (Source: ABC News)

Nothing went right for Steve. He lost cellphone reception and took multiple spills - at least twenty falls. After the last one, he couldn't get up. 

Meanwhile, his safe and sound colleagues didn't report that Steve was missing until 9 p.m. "some eight-and-a-half hours after he started his descent, officials said." Eight-and-a-half hours, as it turns out, is roughly waht it takes most hikers to complete the round trip.

Rescue teams sprung into action and after Steve spent a chilly, wet, and solo night in a gully was found near a drainage ditch. He was carried down and taken to a hospital. 

Rescuers said Stephanides was "phenomenally lucky" that the weather cleared on Saturday and he regained enough cellphone service to call 911.

At least Steve was smart enough to finally call 911 and not those colleagues.  

We don't know the full story. Was Steve Stephanides a hiking pro, who waved off his colleagues when they offered to wait up for him? Was he a jerk that they wanted nothing to do with? Were they all from different locations, so weren't a team to begin with, just a bunch of individuals who had Beazley in common, but didn't really work together?  (Steve works in Florida...) 

Were they jerks to abandon their colleague? Shouldn't a cuople of them have stayed at the top to wait for him to arrive? Shouldn't someone have alerted the rescue squads when that storm passed through? And - in a pretty perplexing move - the colleagues, on their way down, had collected the trail markers they had set on the way up. Guess they didn't trust Steve to pick up after himself, and I'm sure one of the rules of the road is to not leave your trail markers behind. Still...

I suspect there'll be plenty of awkward moments if and when these colleagues run into each other. HR might want to intervene. These guys should use some team-building!