Is Climbing Good for Team-Building?

Well, is it?

I don't know where business managers got the idea that climbing would be good for the morale of their workers. I do know that like all their other ideas, it wasn't from a knowledge of climbing. Or teams.

Now, I love climbing, and I'm the last person to tell you not to go into a climbing gym. But there's only so much climbing can do. Here's some things that climbing can do:

• Build Humiity. When you start, you will probably suck. There's nothing like having an eleven year old girl give you advice on how to do the climb you're struggling on. Especially if she's right. It's good for people to start at the bottom of a learning curve occaisionally.
• Build Confidence. When you fall off of a climb, the fault is entirely your own. But the reverse is true as well. When you make it, you don't have to share the credit. And if you are finally able to finish a climb you've been struggling at for weeks, it definitely boosts your confidence. Also, if you keep at it, you will become stronger and more graceful, and able to do something a lot of people can't. That feels good.
• Make you more interesting It follows that if you are doing things more interesting than watching TV (saying, polishing your silverware) that you will become more interesting than people who just watch TV. And climbing is way more interesting than polishing silverware.

But there's some things climbing won't do, and make you more of a team player is one of them. Climbing is a solo activity. Sure, you have a belay partner, but they just keep you from breaking your bones. The best belayer in the world won't help you get up the wall.

If you climb with a co-worker, you may learn a modicum of trust for them. But more you learn to trust the equipment and yourself, and you will learn that in the matter of belaying, your coworker is pretty much interchangeable with anyone else in the gym. This is not a lesson that transfers well to the work place, or if it does, you learned it long before you set foot in the gym.

Trust isn't the sort of thing that transfers, anyway. My wife knows I won't drop her when I'm belaying her. She also knows that when I say I'll get off the computer in "five minutes" Im lying. No matter how well I belay her, she still doesn't trust me there. So think about it: if you don't trust your co-workers, isn't it probably because they have let you down on numerous occaisions? And wouldn't trusting them more actually be detrimental to your work, knowing that one night in a climbing gym is hardly likely to change the structure of their personality?

Climbers are by and large strongly individualistic. Being dedicated to a solo sport does that to a person. If a manager turns his team into climbers, he is actually making them more likely to blow him off and do things their own way. This is probably for the best, but it isn't team-building.

Now, it may seem likely that if managers read this and realise that climbing is not good for team-building, they will be less likely to give the money their team earned to climbing gyms, which is not good. But that assumes that business managers listen to those who don't support their assumptions, so we're all perfectly safe. In fact, I encourage you to tell you manager that you think climbing is good team-building. If you can do something cool on his time, you should.

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