Team Bonding for Fun and Profit

Talking with members of Team Triumph a few days after the 2008 BG U.S. Challenge in Lake Placid, N.Y., the five women are still high on adrenaline from their three-day adventure and talking about competing again next year. In fact, given their less-than-stellar showing in this year's competition, they'd love nothing more than an immediate do-over.

Then they volunteered for the adventure competition. Call it the ultimate team-building event. Participants run, cycle, canoe and navigate through the mountains. They also field brain-teasers and intellectual puzzles--such as building a self-propelled vehicle out of an assortment of logs, wheels and a bungie cord. They operate on little sleep and a lot of exhaustion, pushing themselves to the limits of physical and mental endurance.

Ten of the U.S. teams will be offered a spot at the Intelligent Sport World Series Final on the island of Cyprus in December. They represent: Boy Scouts of America, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Hewlett-Packard, Grassroot Soccer All Stars, Motorola, URS Corp. Volvo Construction Equipment, Infocision, Go Outside and Trendtech.

The goal of the U.S. Challenge is to create high-performance teams for the business world, while raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Teams competing in the past three U.S. Challenges have raised more than $1.4 million for St. Jude. This year, the event added $460,000 to that total, according to Matt Luizza, public relations project manager for the event.

Luizza had a chance to watch the women of Team Triumph work together during the challenge. "I would have thought they'd been together for years," he says. In fact, they met in June, when they began training under the tutelage of Rick Sanders, owner and head coach for Houston Adventure Racing Team Inc.

BG Group, which fielded three teams altogether, brought Sanders on board to help competitors prepare for the 2½-day race. Sanders taught mountain biking skills, orienteering and proper race nutrition to the 15 competitors, among other things.

Unfortunately, team Triumph got lost in the woods on the first day and never recovered, placing 33rd out of 34 teams participating (the last-place team fell out of its canoe and had to forfeit that race). Disappointed at first, the women refused to let it affect their attitude for long.

The first day, they checked and double-checked their gear, and they watched what they ate. The second morning, tired and discouraged, they hauled themselves out of bed for a day of mountain biking. "We didn't check our gear anymore because everybody was missing one glove--the same hand glove, the right glove," Lowery says, chuckling.

"The second day we rallied each other," she says. "It turned into, how are we going to get to the end of this thing and still feel good about it? Because at that point we were so far behind."

'Let's Go Out, Let's Have Fun'
The third day, securely lodged in the back of the pack, "We stopped stressing about the rules. We said, 'Let's go out, let's have fun.' And we had a really, really good time," Lowery says.

Team Triumph also won an award for being the most sportsmanlike team. "We were the team cheering everybody on when they went by, even though they were passing us," McHaney says. "We were the team that, when somebody's car broke down right next door, we were able to jump it for them."

"Everyone was struggling," Lowery says. "We saw other [mixed-gender] teams where the girls were being towed with ropes." Four team members participated in each event, with one person sitting out. On mixed teams, some women sat out more than one event. But Team Triumph didn't have that luxury. "We were a little disappointed that we were the only girls' team out there. We would love to see [more women's teams] next year," McHaney says.

Four of the five women initially decided to participate in the event for the physical benefits of getting into shape. Conde was motivated by the charitable aspect. "My mom had cancer, and I'm very passionate about raising funds for anyone who has cancer, especially children," she says. "Knowing what a great organization St. Jude is, I knew I had to get involved," she says.

But the women's goals changed as they took part in the boot camp-style training over the next several months. "Somewhere along the way," McHaney says, "you switch from just trying to finish it for yourself into thinking about everything as a team. Every day, you feel more responsible and committed to your team, and you can't back out."

Agrees Worthing, "Over time, I found that the camaraderie and the team effort that we all put into it really were the driving force behind why I wanted to do it."

The training was grueling. "Mostly the routine included pushups, sit-ups, swimming--a lot of aerobic activity," Conde says. "We would get on our bike and ride three miles, then we would run three miles, and then [Rick] would throw in some exercises with logs." There were mock adventure races on the weekends, too.

"As hard as Rick was on all of us, he did a great job of preparing us mentally for this race. He does tax you to your limit--and then he throws something else in," Tran says. One exercise included wading through a ditch full of water, right past a beehive. A member of one of the other BG teams hit the beehive. "The beehive exploded," Conde recalls, "and everyone got stung except for Coach Rick."

The women say they are in the best shape of their lives, and they plan to stay that way. Three days after returning from the challenge, three members of the group went running together, and three were planning a bike ride together the next day. "We're in this alliance together now that no one else can join," Worthing says.

McHaney recalled one 12-hour training day when Team Triumph was supposed to work with another BG team as a single, 10-member team. "We had been so conditioned, and we were so familiar with each other and all of our physical strengths and weaknesses, that we left the other team in the dust. We wouldn't even help them with anything; we wouldn't ask them any questions. We ignored them," says McHaney, who captained the team.

"We had to do pushups [as punishment] for that," Lowery adds.

Business Benefits
"The next thing you realize is, you're in one big hotel room sharing one bar of soap and one glove each and looking at each other thinking, 'We are not finishing this without all five of us crossing this finish line. We're doing it and we're doing it all together, and we're doing our best,' " McHaney says.

The women say it will be easy to use the lessons they've learned in the business world. "You can really do anything if you figure out a plan and you figure out a way to get the plan executed," Lowery says.

She also learned when it's time to step up to the plate, and when it's time to trust in someone else's expertise, "Such as knowing when to follow Melissa because she knows how to build a mechanical device that will move forward on its own and simply trust that she's going to do it right."

"That's really key in business," Lowery says. "We had to completely trust each other when someone said that she could do something. If Angie said, 'I can do this mountain bike ride,' you had to trust that she could do the mountain bike ride and push the rest of us through."

It's been a great networking tool, according to Conde and Lowery. "I actually know people in other areas of the company now and can get things moved through faster," Lowery says. "It's not just the people on your team; it's everyone involved in this challenge. People who were involved last year recognize us. Or I'll be noticed by people who weren't even in the challenge and they just know who took part in it. So that's a really simple win right off the bat."

BG, a $60 billion company with 5,000 employees worldwide, has been doing similar sorts of events all over the world for 11 years, according to Dave Keane, vice president of policy and corporate affairs. So when IMG's Challenger World decided to mount a U.S. competition, BG agreed to partner with the event planners. The overall goal, Keane says, "is to develop positive working relationships with partners and competitors."

It's a six-figure commitment for BG, Keane says, but the benefits are substantial. "One of the important messages that the teams learn is that not only is it important to develop a solid strategy, but it's important to recognize if you have a flawed strategy and develop a new one on the go as things are happening around you." That's useful in business as well as the challenge competition.

And BG makes certain the knowledge gained isn't limited only to participants. "One of the things that we do is, we ask that the people share their experiences with other employees through a series of 'lunch and learns.' " Those sessions continue through March, when the company starts gearing up for the next event.

"It's a very good event; it challenges employees to be the best that they are and commit themselves to something that helps them get there," Keane says.

"The women were outstanding," Keane concludes. "They leaned a lot about themselves and a lot about developing strategy and paying attention to detail."