What is the most stupid teamwork workshop in which you have ever...

...had to participate at work?

I had to build a lego thingy with written directions and the assistance of a team.

Oh, and there was the challenge course. And the stupid movies.

What about you? Briggs Meyers tests? What kind of tree would you be? Pretend bunker with 12 other people--choose them? Retreats?

What was most the most ridiculous?

Used to have to keep going on these work-sponsored holiday retreats that were designed to “promote self esteem”, “build up friendships and working relationships” and whatever other idealistic terms the business management wanted to apply to the event. In reality they actually increased the tensions between the various co-workers to boiling point and to such an extent that, after one retreat, one of my close friend’s co-workers lost his cool and physically assaulted my friend. On another occasion people used the retreat to try and stage a coup against the management. My friend left the firm shortly after the assault incident

of a story about one of my friends.

He's a rough character--an oil well snubber--the most dangerous job in the industry. His life is on the line everytime he goes out on a job--he always tells me goodbye before he goes, as if he is never coming back.

It's a high tension job, and the guys who work in his unit have occasionally gotten into fights. No one hurt severely, but enough to cause his company great concern.

The company required everyone in his unit to attend an "anger management" seminar. They did, and other units were at the same seminar. Afterwards, all the guys went out for drinks at a little Louisiana roadhouse.

The next day, my friend shows up at my house with a black eye and bad cuts on his knees. It seems that, an hour after the seminar, my buddy got into a fight with someone in another unit (both men had been at the seminar) and they "took it outside," where a full-fleged brawl occurred between the two units. My bud fell down in the parking lot, which was covered in oyster shell, and cut the hell out of his knees.

So much for sending oil hands to anger management seminars. :-)

and walk together. Management is often bizarre.

Some of it was actually fun. It was geared toward things we could use with kids.

I'm not crazy about the things that require you to get in each other's physical space (like the balloon walk where everyone has to hold balloons between their bodies with no hands and the whole group has to move across the room without dropping any of the balloons).

One that I thought was really hilarious was the animal search. Everyone has to pick (without telling) from four animals (dog, cat, frog or duck) and, blindfolded, making only the sound of your animal, find and hold on to all the other people in the room who chose the same animal. Imagine big groups of people, blindfolded and holding on to each other, shuffling around the room going MEOW, MEOW or RUFF, RUFF at the top of their lungs.

They sent my team to a "working well with others" workshop.

We had the facilitator in tears.

I am sceptical of many of these so-called "team building" exercises. I am a management professor (Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior) at a university and just have to laugh when people talk about this crap. A lot of it is just assholes trying to make money consulting companies.

I have a colleague who really gets into some of that shit in his classes- some of his students just eat it up, some of his students absolutely hate it. To each his/her own.

I do advocate certain types of team building but really think a lot of it is just absolute crap.

with ever team could get the most decks in order by suit and numbers won

i never did get that

courtesy of that toothy freak Tony Robbins