It was three days of desert sand. If not blowing into your face, it was digging into every crevice of clothing. No sunhat, sunglasses, face mask nor foot covering seemed protection enough.
And then there was the hot sun and even, one night, hard rain. “On the record, it was not fun at all,” says Kai Hu in an e-mail, “but it was worth it.”
This is the impression that graduate students and alumni from the University of British Columbia gave of a team-building exercise taken to the extreme.
Twenty-four current and former students of UBC’s international MBA program in Shanghai trekked a three-day footrace this spring over unending dunes in the Tengger Desert in China’s Inner Mongolia. Mr. Hu, an alumnus, was the UBC team leader.
“We experienced sand storms in the first few days and heavy rain in the second night. The temperature was around zero [Celsius] in the nighttime, and 30 in the daytime. We had to wear masks all the time. According to the organizer, the weather conditions were the worst in five years,” he says.
Mr. Hu has no one but himself to blame. He presented the idea of forming a team at the program’s alumni new year’s dinner in February. Most of the team was made up of alumni.
A desert race is more challenging than most, but team-building exercises are central to the business school and postuniversity experience, sometimes even the defining experience. “Working in a team is so embedded in business that it’s a natural way to be. But that doesn’t mean that we’re naturally good at it. It’s a skill that you have to learn,” says Liz Starbuck Greer, assistant dean at UBC’s Sauder School of Business’ Robert H. Lee Graduate School.
Of the desert challenge, she says, “They wanted to really test themselves as individuals and as a team. … That’s quite a unique and supercharged way of doing it.”
Team-building is viewed as essential not just because teamwork is what business is all about, but also because the structure and purpose of teams are fast evolving into something very different. Where once teams were stable units within an organization, they are becoming ever more fluid, what Harvard professor Amy Edmondson describes as “teaming.”
Teaming is about people often switching teams and switching to new tasks quickly. As the workplace becomes more complicated and even more integrated, teaming also requires instant trust and a safe environment in which it’s okay to fail.
In the desert race, for example, failure occurred all the time, and everyone’s roles within the group changed continually.
“We usually trekked in groups of three to four, of which there was inevitably someone injured or with a pulled muscle, someone motivated to go fast, and someone in between. These roles continually shifted. So the motivation within these small groups, and the teamwork that got us through the race, was the biggest takeaway for me,” says James Reiss, a student in the UBC program, which is in partnership with the Antai College of Economics and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. An American, he has lived in China for 10 years.
The race lacked many amenities, requiring some quick thinking. “There was no toilet. You needed to find a way to solve the problem,” says Mr. Hu, the team leader. “Even worse, there were 1,500 people in the desert with no cover. The best way was to cover the face, not the ass.”
Granted, this isn’t a skill immediately relevant in normal business life. But it’s the kind of nonjudgmental improvisation that modern teaming requires.
Other team-building exercises back at UBC, however, tend not be so physical and Outward Bound-like. Instead, in group exercises that students typically face during their studies, “What we try to do is simulate the real world as much as possible,” says Ms. Starbuck Greer. “So, most of the team-building activity you do as an MBA student at Sauder is as a project. You have a deliverable, you have a timeline. And you have to get together and work together to make that happen. All that is really a simulation of real life.”
The team emphasis begs the question about whether some are naturally better at team-building exercises. What about introverts who may be brilliant business people, just not very good team-building participants? As Ms. Starbuck Greer says, the school helps the student “work though the different dynamics that they come up against.”
The rewards can be worth the hardships, says Mr. Reiss from the UBC team. Eating during the race “usually consisted of beef jerky, Snickers and some fruit. However, eating on the run in a windy desert doesn’t always go smoothly, and we often ended up with a mouthful of sand between apple bites.”
And then, he notes, “both evenings, when we got to the campsite, the organizers provided dinner, which consisted of instant noodles and lamb stew, a local specialty in Inner Mongolia. After days full of difficult and often painful hiking through the beautiful scenery, surrounded by sand hills and good friends, those will be remembered as some of my favourite meals.”