Hello and welcome to week six of Organizational Change class!
We were asked to review two YouTube™ videos about Eco Seagate, a team building outdoor lab that the Seagate Technology company puts on each year. Seagate is a computer hardware manufacturer that builds hard drives. The cost of the lab is quoted at approximately $2 million per year (Brown, 2011, p. 274). 200 Seagate employees are selected to participate each year out of 2000 applying to go.
The CEO of Seagate has been unable to quantitatively prove the value of the investment he is making in the company’s people (Brown, 2011, p.274). In the two videos, the examples of team members helping each other and coming together after a challenge are apparent. Since the videos were shot by Seagate, I would expect them to illustrate those points. Team-building is the underlying theme for the entire lab. The participants are thrown into new and stressful situations where they have to rely on each other to succeed. Many of the lecture topics in part two of the video were about conflict and conflict management. That would seem to indicate that Seagate management feels their people are under-equipped to deal with conflict situations at work. This model is used by the military and other organizations who are looking to build bonds of trust and a sense of accomplishment for their teams.
There is value in the process Seagate uses. There is also risk in putting people in these situations. Those that succeed will find benefit in the program. There may be those that fail or get injured. Those people may not find the benefit of the experience nearly as useful. For some, the opportunity to travel to faraway lands may be reward enough for going. Others are probably looking for the chance to test themselves and see how far they can push against their comfort zones. Some are hoping to get noticed by the company leadership for their performance in the stressful situations. Others will have their own reasons for applying and why it would be meaningful to them. As noted above, the issue really lies in attempting to quantify the benefits to the company that are received for the $2 million price tag. The training is slanted toward building high-performance teams and illustrating the habits those teams need to operate. If Seagate could point to a greater number of high-performance teams, the critics may be quieted.
However, high-performance teams are not the workplace norm at any organization. They have a life-cycle and naturally disband when their task is complete, much like the teams do at the end of the EcoSeagate week (Whetten & Cameron, 2011). As described by Tuckman (1965), teams go through the stages of forming, norming, storming, and performing. Many teams do not make it through the cycle. Those teams are apt to perform at a lower level that teams who make it through all the steps. EcoSeagate is an attempt to push 200 employees through all the stages so they can see what the process is and, more importantly, what it feels like to go through the process and succeed. As noted by Whetten & Cameron, “Once a person experiences this kind of excellence, team performance stuck in the first three stages of development will never be satisfactory again” (2011, p. 506). Again, the CEO of Seagate needs to quantify the results if he wishes to get the shareholders and other critics to quiet down. Can he point to a higher number of teams that are performing at a high level?
My company has a Leadership Center that is utilized as a University setting for employees to attend. Various classes are held there and team-building exercises are sometimes carried out. I do not know the budget for maintaining the Leadership Center, but I would suspect that it is at least as much as Seagate spends on EcoSeagate. I have not heard of groups doing outdoor labs to improve performance. I have participated in group testing where leaders are trying to define the personalities, learning styles, and leadership styles in their groups. Very little follow-up accompanied the tests and they became examples of stories that start, “Remember that day we wasted doing that test…?” Simply taking the tests doesn’t do much unless the data is collected and put to use.
My organization could definitely benefit from a team-building outdoor lab experience. The group is not co-located, so we rarely get to see each other. We are usually tasked with numerous projects that have high visibility and relatively high risk. The need for high-performance is definitely present a majority of the time. It would be beneficial to have members from organizations that support the work my team accomplishes, so a level of trust could be built. The trust is low amongst most groups right now. Finding the money would be difficult, but not insurmountable. The asset that would be almost impossible to find is the time. We have too few people doing too many things to be able to dedicate three to five days to really bond. Creative thinking would need to be applied to find a way.
See you next week!
Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experiential Approach to Organizational Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice-Hall.
Tuckman, B. W. (1965). "Developmental sequence in small groups." Psychological Bulleting 63(6): 16.
Whetten, D. A. and K. S. Cameron (2011). Developing Management Skills. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall.
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