Why Sailing?
Sailing is the perfect team building event: it combines cooperation, responsibility and commitment, along with a great dose of fun!
That’s why this summer we decided to head up to Lake Garda to take part in a sailing team building event.
Program
The day started early in the morning, our bus picked us up at the Würth Phoenix headquarters at 6:00 AM. The appointment was at 9:00 in Brenzone sul Garda, a small but lovely town on the coast of the biggest lake in Italy.
The sailing company guys started by showing us the boats’ details and the safety rules. It was really exciting because they told us that we were going to use really fast boats!
After a 30 minute lesson, we were divided into 4 smaller teams, and they brought us to the boats.
Each team had an experienced captain (working for the sailing company) who continued the theory lesson before raising the anchor.
Once the roles were clear to everyone we finally started to sail, always guided by the captain. It wasn’t easy in the beginning, even if every single role didn’t seem so hard. The fact is that to make the things work, everyone need to do his job, but with the same importance, everyone need to be coordinated with the other members of the same team. Every single action is meant to be a vital part of a whole working machine.
In fact, we spent the morning learning how to be a better team.
We headed back to the shore to have lunch in a restaurant with a stunning lake view, where we could taste some of the very local food dishes.
Revitalized from a good meal and some rest, we were ready for the challenge of the day: the regatta!
Fresh from our morning lessons, we switched to race mode, where everyone was focused and ready to give his or her very best to make the “machine” work in the best way possible.
There was a lot of suspense, and no team gave up till the finish line.
Everyone could be happy about their result because there were no big gaps, meaning that every team worked really well. Now it was time to relax and celebrate!
We came back to solid ground then, where we had a good pizza together, giving us the opportunity to continue to have fun, summing up the whole day’s experience.
Conclusions
I think it was a great experience, for both learning to be a team and for socializing. It was never too stressful but at the same time everyone had to give his full commitment.
It must also be said that everyone could find his own role in the team very easily, there were no conflicts and everyone approached it in a really positive and proactive way.
I saw a lot of happy colleagues and I can’t suggest more highly the same experience to any company who wants to take its team building to the next level.
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