Our friend Cathy was over for dinner the other night, telling us about her department’s latest teambuilding exercise. She and her colleagues spent a day at a cooking school that climaxed with their preparing a group dinner, eating it and then rising as one the next day to call in sick. (Okay, I made up the part about calling in sick, but the rest was true.)

 

She told us this story with great seriousness, concluding with her belief that pasta preparation had taught her and her colleagues what was really important in their jobs and that, somewhere between sifting flour and beating eggs, they bonded. We would have believed in the power of the concept had she offered to help us prepare dinner. 

 

Where was it ever proved that companies work better after these exercises? As a sullen, anti-social loner, I find them offensive. Do you think that, right now, some colleague is offering to help me write this? They’re not even offering me any of their pasta! They’re out banging bongos.

 

Yes, one popular teambuilding exercise is to seat employees in a circle and have them play drums as a “powerful metaphor for high-performance teaming and what those high-performance teams can look like,” said one drum advocate/lunatic. One company, Drum Café, has drum-circle facilitators in a number of cities. Its founder—who, no kidding, is called the father of the corporate drum-circle movement—has 10,000 drums in a warehouse of the father of the drum-warehouse movement. 

 

I saw a photograph of a drum-circle session. A number of employees are arranged, not surprisingly, in a circle and they are playing, not surprisingly, drums. In the middle of their circle was another employee, who appeared either to be doing the limbo, having a seizure or reeling from a gunshot. She was smiling, so I think it was more likely she had been shot.

 

If you’ve not been involved in a teambuilding exercise lately, you probably will be. Some human resources persons say that teambuilding exercises will become more prevalent if the job market improves enough that companies find themselves in need of novel ways to try to annoy employees. “Drummed out” will have an entirely different meaning.

 

I have arrived at my low opinion of teambuilding exercises after having been myself subjected to many. During one we drove racecars. And we drove them by ourselves! I’d think, if you wanted to build a team, you’d have someone like that marketing assistant sit on my lap and steer while I worked the gas, brakes and bongos. 

 

In another, we had to build a rope course in a game we quickly dubbed “Lynch the VP.” In a third, we spent an afternoon playing laser tag. That, I thought, was the exercise that most closely approximated our work environment at that time because it involved keeping your head down, trying to hide your whereabouts, ambushing others and sweating. 

 

Enjoyable as it was to speed madly in a circle, to decorate my palms with rope burns, and to point a laser weapon at my boss and imagine her vaporizing in a red mist of protoplasm, I confess that none of these exercises did anything to transform us into one of those high-performance teams. We would inevitably conclude each activity with proclamations that we had succeeded in gaining some valuable new insight into one another and into our role in serving our corporate master. But within a day or so we would revert to doing things the way we’d always done them—obediently, sullenly, individually.

 

I’ve noticed this about our friend Cathy, too. Although much of our food has passed her lips, the words “high-performance team” have not. She shows no desire to join her colleagues again in fixing food, nor any to join us either. Some things you just can’t drum into people.