Ego-sustainable' team building: a new paradigm in people management

Back in the 1980s, the idea of team building conjured up images of employees wearing too-tight ties, shiny shoes and lost gazes as they tackled the latest gimmicks: walking on hot coals, crossing a Tibetan bridge, zip lining into the void or roped climbing a mountain. It was a time when organisations believed that challenging their employees to prove their mettle was the best way to create a cohesive and motivated team. If you could survive that kind of activity, they thought, you could surely endure even the most terrible of Monday mornings in the office.

In those years, team building was more like a rite of passage than an opportunity for collective growth. The prevailing idea was that putting people in extreme situations would strengthen interpersonal bonds and stimulate mutual trust. To be fair, there was something epic about those trials: facing fire, overcoming fears of emptiness or heights, engaging in extreme tests. It was a living metaphor for the age of hyper-competitiveness and excelling at all costs.

Often, however, the result was a mixture of physical and psychological trauma. Make no mistake, the idea of testing one's limits may have its merits, but at what price? Many employees took part in these activities with a mixture of terror and resignation, hoping not to break an ankle or worse still, not to have to make an embarrassing impression in front of their colleagues.

Fast forward to the 2020s, team building has undergone a radical transformation in line with the new demands that have emerged. The obsession with productivity, increasingly ambitious KPIs, the 'always on' culture, physical distance, ever more micromanagement, teams spread across different geographic areas and at least four generations working side by side have called for a decisive change of course. To survive in some organisations is already a heroic act in itself, there is no longer any need to prove it.

The rallying cry becomes stemming corporate toxicity, disenchantment of some people and loss of others. An unhealthy environment not only reduces productivity, but can also lead to high turnover rates and significant costs for the company. There is a growing need for individual well-being and collective well-being. This is how we have gone from walking on hot coals to walking in nature, from stress to wellness, from crossing Tibetan bridges to building relational bridges.