OFF-SITES

Contrary to the assumptions of his rivals, Rich O’Connor had no tolerance for touchy-feely off-site meetings. In fact, his staff had come to refer to his meetings as “hug-free zones,” a term they coined during Telegraph’s first management retreat five years earlier. It was then that Maurine, Jamie’s predecessor, insisted on doing a team-building exercise off-site and invited a consultant to do a half-day session for the Telegraph staff.

Her consultant opened the meeting with a feeble but innocuous trust-building exercise in which the executives were blindfolded and had to solve a simple problem using only their voices and sense of touch. The consultant could not see Rich rolling his eyes behind his blindfold; if he had, he certainly would not have attempted the next exercise.

After the team had shed their blindfolds and were seated around the conference table, the consultant asked them to write their birth dates on a name tag and place it on their shirt so others could see. Maurine and everyone else in the room, with the apparent exception of the consultant, noticed that Rich’s ears had suddenly turned red, a leading indicator that he was getting frustrated.

As soon as the consultant started listing everyone’s astrological signs, the rest of Rich’s face went red. He stood from his seat to protest, but before he could say anything, Maurine headed off the catastrophe: “Let’s take a five-minute break so we can check voice mail.” The room dispersed like a class of sixth-graders headed for recess.

When the executives returned, all evidence of the consultant was gone, and Maurine was standing in front of them sheepishly. “Let me just say, I had absolutely no idea! A friend of mine recommended this guy, and I guess I assumed he knew what he was doing.”

Her colleagues could see how embarrassed Maurine was. Tom broke the silence with a statement he delivered in his most serious voice: “I was really worried there for a second. I thought Rich, being a Leo and all, was going to kill the guy.” The room erupted in laughter.

That consultant, whose name everyone had forgotten, became something of an anonymous legend at Telegraph. In fact, every time Maurine planned an off-site, she tried to include at least one reference to a fictitious exercise that was sure to incite the humor and horror of her colleagues and their non-touchy-feely leader.

Jamie was accustomed to dealing with executives who proclaimed a distaste for all things soft. But he had found that most of them were more open to behavioral exercises than they were willing to admit. So he decided that it would be okay to push Rich and his team outside their comfort zone, if only for a few hours.

When they saw that the first item on the agenda was called “Controlled Confrontation,” the management team assumed it was Jamie carrying on the same humorous tradition that Maurine had started. In fact, they thought it was a pretty clever title for Jamie’s first meeting—just the sort of topic that would touch a nerve among the staff.

No one knew that Jamie was unaware of the humor.