It’s not a bad life when as part of your job you are asked to leave the office, drive down to Pembrokeshire, travel to one of the best stretches of coastline in northern Europe, and throw yourself of a cliff into the sea with some like minded people, all in the name of benefiting your business. Well, this is what happened to me last week as I sampled the delights of what is known as coasteering.
It was all part of a day organised by Preseli Venture, who are a business that I know very well and rate as being one of the best in Wales that deliver highly professional activity experiences, alongside the likes of Call of the Wild (Welsh small business of the year 2008), Gower Surfing Development, Euphoria Sailing and Snowdonia Guides.
Anyway, up until last week, I had always been very sceptical about businesses who offer team building as a ‘bolt-on’ to their general activity offering. I had had my hands burnt so many times in the past having seen this done very badly, and never before had the benefit of a professional company committed to delivering team building as a core activity. So this was different, even from the start.
The day started by meeting up with some colleagues all working in tourism who I have not seen for a long stretch, so that was a good start. A great presentation followed by Chris of Elysian Training by who led us through the morning session which involved the usual splitting into two groups and a non verbal communication lesson that taught us the true value of delegation, team work, motivation, communication and leadership. Really got us thinking about management, leadership and the distinction between the two!
After a tasty light lunch with local produce of course (only further demonstrating Preseli Venture’s obvious sustainability ethic, in a way that I wish other businesses in Wales could see!), it was time for the main event, the coasteer! There was about 12 of us in all, I didn’t really know anyone who was left at this stage as many had chickened out by now. So, it was a great opportunity to judge once and for all whether activities like this can teach you something and help you gel as a team.
About coasteering. It’s something that I wouldn’t normally do as a rule, the thought of the freezing cold sea, drowning, climbing cliffs, jumping off, posy adrenalin junkies, waves and more big waves has never really appealed to me until now, and that’s because I felt I had to do it if I’m honest! So this is what we did basically but I remember very selfishly looking after myself as I was bobbing around in the waves, so is this the way we react when faced with such an onslaught in business? The very fact that I was asking this of myself and also that I recognised how selfish I had become is surely one of the by-product benefits of this experience. We had little time to engage in traditional human tower building which they usually do in one of the caves along the coast here, which I am sure would have resulted in a certain degree of bonding. But for me the true building was done in the morning, but coasteering does have some obvious benefits for teams working in business. For one, it taught me personally how I could break a team rather than build one , and the feeling of enormous sense of accomplishment and ease of communication on the journey back was surely a positive. We didn’t really have the chance to share a bunk or copious volume of alcohol to satisfy a taste that had been built up throughout the day which I am sure would have even strengthen the camaraderie even further, but this taster with professionals, had certainly benefited my understanding of team building and more importantly the necessity to do something like this with your staff outside of the work environment.
What I am not sure of though is how these lessons learnt would be applied and for how long once returning to work. Maybe companies have to do this annually to really see the benefits on staff and team morale. I certainly would, I’m hooked, and Pembrokeshire or Gower are the perfect places to do it!
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