Performance Management Blog

Engaging Senior Managers in Large Group Teambuilding Events
Senior Managers can help teams get out of the ditch and up on the road

Engaging Senior Managers is a real challenge; to really gain their commitment to collaboration, actively involve them in delivering a large group teambuilding event!

The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine (LDGM) is a powerful team building simulation that we have been running since 1993 for small as well as large group teambuilding events. Initial thoughts on designing the operational side of the game was to make it very simple to deliver with the idea that the exercise could be run by senior executives. The design made this straightforward and simple and our new Lost Dutchman Virtual (LDV) is also congruent with this framework.

My goal is to put forward some ideas that can be used with any large group event where involving the senior manager team would be useful for the visibility and for their collaboration. This blog is framed around our flagship team building game, however, the ideas presented should stand on their own and be useful with any activity.

Since rolling out Dutchman back in 1993, it has been great to get the stories about successes in such frameworks, since the impacts of the senior managers leading the play and the debriefing would obviously be much more effective in sending messages than if outside consultants or people in training were running the program. Plus, with the exercise’s simple design, they could also run large groups, seamlessly, making it ideal for group events of 100 or more participants.

A while back, a sole practitioner was asking me how to staff a large group delivery of the program and how to optimize the debriefing. A perfect question, actually. How better to sell the program than without the added costs of needing a bunch of costly co-facilitators — and how to better the impact using the involvement of the senior staff of the organization in the delivery. So, let me elaborate:

First of all, Dutchman is one of the truly great team building exercises, one that works well with very large groups. My largest session was 600 people, but a software company in India holds the record with 870 people in one room at one time. And the design structure of the exercise allows for solid debriefing linked to specific issues and opportunities for improving teamwork and collaboration. The Dutchman game can drive real change and commitment.

Large group team building delivery - INSIDE - with everything under control!

Delivering Dutchman with the direct and active involvement of an organization’s leadership team is ideal.

Generating real organizational change or aligning people to the company mission, goals and strategy is always an issue. How does one generate real involvement, alignment and active ownership involvement among the senior management team and then among all of the key performers? I find that their active involvement and engagement and understanding of dynamics, along with clear discussions about past and future choices for changes and behaviors, is what generates impact and value. Them “sitting in” or watching the behavior of others will not generate any momentum for doing anything differently. With them actively delivering and supporting the game, change is much more likely to happen.

Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine Debriefing Images for discussing plans, rushing out and being successfulParticipants form small teams to discuss their strategy and plans, reaching agreement on how to operate and what resources are needed. They they head to the mine with great engagement and enthusiasm. The result is that every team is successful and that they all contribute to the overall success.


 

Delivering a large group event using the exercise represents a unique and unparalleled opportunity for you to accomplish some real executive team building. Here’s why:

  • Senior managers like to respond to challenges; it is in their DNA. Therefore, having them learn and then act to facilitate a program that generates alignment of their people toward the organization’s goals and objectives creates a great challenge.
  • Senior managers will often talk teamwork but they operate their own groups in a way that isolates them from real inter-organizational collaboration. We hear the term “silo” enough to know that it represents an organizational reality. So putting them into a situation where teamwork is required for effectiveness, makes it easier to get these behaviors down the road. Working as a team generates teamwork, especially when there is follow up and discussion about the impacts of making improvements.
  • Instead of some unknown consultant and support people running around during a facilitated event, having senior managers walking the talk and supporting teamwork and sharing resources and behaving congruently? The role of the Expedition Leadership is, “to help teams be successful.”

In the Dutchman exercise, the expressed goal is, “To mine as much gold as we can.” The framework and desired result is to generate an optimal Return on Investment.

Senior Managers can help teams get out of the ditch and up on the road

You get your managers aligned and congruent to the goals of the game by first playing the game together and debriefing their results, outcomes and choices. Then, the debriefing shifts to focus on what changes need to be made to impact and optimize organizational results for the organization at large. Then discussion closes around their desired outcomes for the upcoming larger event.

Dutchman was designed to be easy to facilitate As part of the initial thinking about how it should play, I did not want my company to need a staff of people to do licensing or certification nor did I want to make the exercise too hard for players to understand. And I knew that having the client’s own people help facilitate had many advantages and much greater impacts. It was also important that non-training people (the managers) would be able to deliver the game and many line managers have run the exercise over the years with great success. (You can see 30+ testimonials by clicking on the image below.)

Dutchman has had 30+ years of polishing to make it into a very straightforward team building program where there are few hidden tricks. It allows for the complete congruence of all of the facilitating staff to support the players in solving the planning and execution challenges presented. (A Press Release is here.)

The banking of the game and the tracking of team behaviors was also designed to be simple and clearly understood in the debriefing. There are no “mechanical” issues or illogical demands and it is easy to learn how to operate the game. The goal was to enable a facilitator to pay more attention to the observed behaviors rather than needing to become some expert on game mechanics and unnecessary complexities.

When I first started my deliveries, I would assemble some people (like hotel front desk personnel) and pay them for a few hours of their time to help me deliver large games (50 people or more). Smaller games were operable by myself.

As I was asked to deliver even larger events, I would generally get internal company people together for an hour or so to teach them the mechanics — these were often the training or HR staff who were supporting the event. But I eventually discovered that involving the senior managers in the delivery created the biggest impact! It just makes more sense to do things that way.

Now, for a large session of 200 or more, I first deliver a team building event for the most senior managers, running them through the actual exercise with a short debriefing of results and impacts. With a half day designated for such training, we debriefed a bit on the goals that were set for the big event and talked about the mechanics of banking and supporting the exercise on the floor. We would involve them in the full debriefing during the large event.

If they would commit to a full day of training and collaboration, I could also get their ideas and agreement on alignment and shared goals for the organization, link that to the desired debriefing of the results of their large group team building event, and then put them into an active role for that delivery. Some could be the Provisioners who would “bank” and some could help as coaches on the floor answering questions and providing direct team support. But their active ownership of the overall design created a very strong positive impact.

THIS became my most effective overall design focus for large groups:

  • Get the senior managers in a collaborative and aligned mode of operation and give them an active role in the exercise = ownership
  • Have a collaborating team of senior managers supporting their people in the large group event and in the debriefing, improving actual organizational alignment and directly / actively supporting inter-team collaboration

This design also gives me the ability to put my executive coaching hat on, debriefing them with the goal of improving the senior leadership teamwork with real purpose. It also enables me to run really large groups without the use of outside people required for assisting in the delivery of the game.

You can imagine how that positively impacts my profitability, decreases client costs and minimizes any staffing issues. We also have plenty of management help for running the game itself, an involved and committed leadership group aligned to a shared goal and purpose.

I can also charge the client a LOT less than my competitors because we are not charging for extra staff and their travel expenses and all that. 

Imagine the staffing needs to run a typical experiential exercise for 300 people versus the ability to deliver a senior manager team building session plus the large teambuilding event with only my active involvement and participation. Simplicity and effectiveness!

We generate a much higher likelihood of behavioral change and implementation of organizational improvement after the event, since the managers are given a powerful hands-on collaborative experience in working with each other to maximize the results of the event itself.

The debriefing of that senior manager session focusing on discussing the kinds of behaviors these senior managers would like to see from the people during the large event helps tie things together. The focus on the shared missions and visions and the generation of alignment to goals, objectives and expectations becomes quite clear.

Having these real Senior Managers in this game delivery role is a great leadership learning lesson on how to implement change and support high performance. One cannot simply TALK about what leaders and players should be doing; they have to behave consistently and congruently to actually generate results.

And behaviors of the teams playing the game directly parallel what we see in organizations. While a few of the tabletop teams will have precisely what they need to perform at a maximum level, those same teams will often choose NOT to collaborate, to thus “win” the game at the cost of negatively impacting overall organizational results. This is one of the great debriefing points — that collaboration is a desired overall organizational outcome!

I hope that this framework has been informative and helpful. Apologies if I wound around a bit and said the same thing a couple of times. But this is a novel yet extremely impactful approach to generating engagement and alignment.

We sell the original Dutchman on-site game directly to end users looking for a high-impact, low cost training tool and also rent this on-site game for a one-time use for North American customers. 

The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine - LD-Rental

For the FUN of It!

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools.
Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant who is trying to retire!! He now lives in Cuenca, Ecuador.

You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

Learn more about Scott at his LinkedIn site.


Here is a 2-minute overview of our new online, virtual team building game: https://youtu.be/6sFUOTjdUVg

The exercise has many links to the themes of trust (within and between teams) with a strong focus on trust in the leadership and on collaboration between the teams. This is THE world-class exercise anchored to these elements, based on three decades of client feedback.

logo for Lost Dutchman Virtual online edition

 

This text is a link to a press release about The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine teambuilding exercise and its 30 years of impacting people and performance.

Square Wheels® is a registered trademark of Performance Management Company
The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine is a trademark of Performance Management Company
Square Wheels images © Performance Management Company, 1993 – 2023. All rights reserved.

Dr. Scott Simmerman

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of the amazing Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine team building game and the Square Wheels facilitation and engagement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced global presenter. -- You can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com and a detailed profile is here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsimmerman/ -- Scott is the original designer of The Search for The Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine teambuilding game and the Square Wheels® images for organizational development.

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