Two teambuildings and a funeral

Early Wednesday morning we headed over to the office where a bus and other colleagues from the Atlanta office were getting ready to head off. We were getting picked for the 1½ hour trip to Callaway Gardens, Pine Mountain where the quarterly leadership off-site was taking place. The bus ride down south to Pine Mountain was nice and once we got to the hotel, we checked in and relaxed for a while before our first teambuilding activity.

The company had organized an ‘adventure day’ on the beach where we got divided into teams and were given a number of different activities to complete like; Frisbee golf, a sack race, an egg toss, a canoe race, team sandcastle building, a game of cranium, and a mouse trap rigging competition. It was great fun, and it was really great to get to know the Atlanta-guys a little bit more in an informal and ‘dressed down’ setting. They are a great group of people, and it was really amazing to see how Americans can pull together and root their team to victory. That is something we could definitely get better at in Europe. Tracie and I had practiced on our ‘Americanisms’ before we left, but were pleasantly surprised when we met the team. We had never heard so many “awesome!”, “good job!”, “high five!”, “we got this!”, “thank you!” and “you’re welcome!” in our lives. On the bus over to the beach, the noise of all the guys chatting away sounded like a bag of cats, but I’d rather have that than a group of people that only interact based on necessity and people that only speak when spoken to.

Later in the evening we had a great 3 course dinner with the whole group and a couple of drinks afterwards. Good times!

On day 2, Thursday, we learned all about effective project management and were also divided into groups for another team building activity relating to project management. In the afternoon, we all had some free time and the company had also organized individual activities; either a round of golf or a spa treatment. I opted for a nice full body massage, and man, it was a nice massage indeed. Afterwards, I was a bit dehydrated as expected, and the bones and muscles in my body were all pushed back into place and the therapist got so many knots out so when she was finally done it felt like I had been rolled down a hill, then been run over by a heavy boulder (Indiana Jones style) and finally been hit by a speeding bus, but it was awesome! I then took a long walk around one of the lakes, Robin Lake, in the gardens and made my way to ”Mr. Cason’s Vegetable Garden”, one of the mini-gardens at Callaway. Fantastic little plot of land with plantations of rare and common spices, vegetables, and flowers. Made for nice photos!

In the evening, everyone was wearing black attire because our vice president had pre-requested this; however we did not know why. When we got down to the restaurant we were greeted with a red rose each and were ‘welcomed to the funeral’. The theme of the night was ‘2009 Laid To Rest’ and we had a full-on funeral for the awful economic year of 2009 complete with speeches, a crying widow, Kleenex and a cake shaped as a gravestone with a raven on top. The cake was delicious!

On day 3, the meetings continued and leaders from our different teams delivered presentations directed to a specific other internal team and everyone got to critique their presentation skills to further improve the way leaders communicate and present. For me personally it was very useful and a good learning experience, especially the focus on ‘less is more’ when creating PowerPoint presentations and delivering data and facts to senior leaders.

After lunch, we all headed back towards Atlanta on the bus, tired but content with the week. The bus dropped Tracie and I off at the airport, and we had an overnight flight (on September 11th!) back to Europe to look forward to. The joy!