Play Date

So in one of my first weeks here I was tasked with organizing..what I call...a play date between my division, International Games and the Paralympic division of Team O'Neill.  As I sat in our weekly staff meeting and was told how they wanted to do something more than just a happy hour but a team building activity I figured I could handle this without any real problems.  Seriously how many team buildings have I been through...like a million. From Navy Seals to singing kumbaya I've been through a lot of team building activities and you never know what you are going to get with team building.

I originally planned to do like a little game of boccia ball, something simple nothing too crazy and would hopefully get everyone mingling. In an effort to get some additional suggestions I walked to down to HR and asked, James (the USOC Talent Manager) if he happened to have any suggestions as to what we could do for team building.  Turns out it was my lucky day and he suggested that he would fly in a professional team builder, that he had been wanting to use, and let my play date become his guinea pigs. 

So here I am thinking, I've got this all covered,  until I started to look at all of the calendars.  Seriously trying to pin down a dozen people for one afternoon is pretty much impossible.  Not to mention the fact that I was tasked with pulling a bunch of workaholics away from their cubes for 3 precious hours.  It took almost two weeks to finally get a date set, for the middle of August. Almost 6 weeks later than when I was first tasked with this project!

Regardless I think the Team Building day went off pretty well.  Everyone seemed to be in a pretty good mood for it.  We did some physical and some mental challenges, and thankfully there was no singing!  Overall I would say it was a success and it certainly was better than spending three hours of my day sitting in a cube!