May was a fantastic month for the Groove Management team. With flowers blooming and spring in the air, teams took the chance to reunite in person. It was a bit of a rebirth of the in person culture building that has been missing over the past few years. We were fortunate to have had the opportunity to plan and facilitate events for several great organizations. At Groove Management, we have coined our team building offsites as The Team Timeout. We leverage the sports analogy that in sports teams call timeout for a variety of strategic purposes from resting the players to drawing up a game winning play. Unfortunately in business, too few teams call timeout. In sports, timeouts play a critical role to boost team performance, and we believe the same to be true in business.

The particular workshop that we ran three times during the month of May was our Charity Bike Build Team Challenge. This is one of our favorites to deliver and it is also one that always inspires our clients. The workshop is set up as a surprise for the participants. All they know in advance is that they will be engaging in an experiential team building workshop. We begin by placing participants in teams of three to five people. The workshop can accommodate groups from 30-300 participants. In their table teams, we begin with an exploration of high performing teams. Participants share insights from their personal experiences on teams and we collectively build a recipe for a high performing team.

Next we infuse a little competition into the workshop tasking each team with creating a team name and choosing a theme song for their team. This is where the competitive juices and the creativity are unleashed. Teams come up with crazy and creative names and rely on their phones and Spotify to share theme songs like Eminem’s Lose Yourself and The Rocky Theme, Eye of the Tiger. It is a fun way to engage the participants. Team tend to want to one up each other. I even had a team run and get a bluetooth speaker, so they could really blast their song, Katy Perry’s Roar. With the teams engaged and feeling good about themselves, we set up the team challenge.

Each team will be given a box containing a product. The teams will have 45 minutes to assemble all of the products and then each team must provide a one minute sales pitch on their product. Things start to get interesting as they open the boxes and realize that they have been tasked with assembling 20” bicycles and then creating sales pitches.

There are other twists to the activity, but I don’t want to ruin the fun, so if you are interested in booking one of these events, for your team reach out and we can share more.

The best part of the session happens at the end once the teams have given their creative sales pitches. It is so interesting to see the various approaches to selling a 20” kids bike. One team played the ET theme and had put a basket on the front of their bike. I saw a team sell two bikes as a BOGO in another pitch. We debrief the sales pitches and then discuss the customer. The question posed to the group is, “Would you allow your son or daughter to randomly choose one of the bikes that was built, not necessarily by your team to go and ride without further inspection?” This opens a discussion about speed versus quality and how effectively the teams worked together versus staying in their siloed teams. The goal was to build all products in the 45 minutes, yet between the team names, team songs and the sales pitches, the teams struggle to see the entire group as one team.

As a final step, we dig into the customer. We explain that the participants will get to meet their customers and to present the bikes. We partner with local charities in each city that we conduct our bike builds. During May we donated 12 bikes to the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Greater Pittsburg, 25 bikes to the Boys and Girls Club of Newport County and 10 bikes to the Salesian Boys and Girls Club in San Francisco. We also partner with local bike shops to tune each bike before it is presented to the recipient. We are fortunate to have a partnership with Kent Bikes where we can source the bikes nationally. Included with each bike is a local and helmet for the recipients.

Seeing the faces of the children as they receive the bikes is priceless, the only thing that compares is the reaction from the participants when they first learn that the bicycles will be donated by their organizations to children in need. At Groove Management we believe the best leaders are servant leaders and we know of no better way to reinforce the power of servant leadership than to model that behavior through our charity bike build team building.

It was a busy and energizing month of May making a positive impact on our clients as well as kids in need.

If your organization is looking for an inspirational team building event that will drive home the importance of collaboration, break down siloes and give back to the local community please reach out to Groove Management.