The Ultimate Team Building Journey – Ragnar Relay – The Pi Group’s Road to High Performance

200 miles, 12 team members, 2 vans, 32 hours and a sense of togetherness.

This weekend The Pi Group took part in the "Reach the Beach" Ragnar Relay a 203-mile running relay road race through New Hampshire. Named after the ninth century Scandinavian king and hero, the race tests you physically and mentally. You stay up all night driving and running a combined 200-ish miles with 11 other sweaty, tired team members. There are a lot of aches and pains and not enough hours of sleep, but the adventure turns out to be the best and craziest time a team can experience together.

As a firm, The Pi Group not only delivers High Performing Capability Programs to our clients, but we also obsess about being a high performing team ourselves. The better we perform as a team, the better our service delivery to our clients. For every high performing team, it is crucial for a little self-evaluation and the Ragnar Relay was our chance to test the six essential attributes which define and set the standard for a high performing team, to make sure we stay true to the those very attributes we believe are the key to any team’s success. The good news for us, was there was plenty of time on a 203-mile road race for a little self-evaluation… 

Attribute 1 - The Right Stuff + The Right Attitude

Our journey started as we piled into two vans at our Darien Headquarters, before embarking on a 5.5-hour road trip up to Bretton Woods in New Hampshire where the race would start. Our 12-strong team was packed with individuals who brought the right stuff with the right attitude. For a high performing team that’s a magical combination that’s not easy to find. The right stuff is an individual’s ability to understand what their job is and to execute on it. In this case, it meant knowing the routes of your race legs and actually being able to run that distance! But signing up to run your share of a 203-mile, overnight, road race in the middle of New Hampshire requires more than the capacity to be able to just physically clock the mileage but more importantly requires the individual to bring the right attitude too. At 3:00am in the morning, when it’s cold, damp and pitch black and you are stuck in your van waiting patiently for your teammate to complete their 7-mile leg, you need a mental mindset and attitude that puts the team first and your needs second. We extol the virtue of ‘hiring for attitude and training for talent’ – we can all train to run the mileage, but a natural selflessness, the right attitude, is what we look for when identifying talent.

Attribute 2 - Clarity

Beyond ‘mere’ talented individuals, high performance requires clarity. Clarity in the vision, mission and objectives of the team and clarity in how such objectives cascade down to each member within it. Simply put, that means members of the team ‘know what to do’. We all knew exactly what to do in this race – three assigned legs per runner. During the first of our three runs, we we’re excited, pumped and crushing it, but slowly realizing we still had two more to go truly testing our commitment as a high performing team.

Attribute 3 - Empowerment

Next, comes the attribute of empowerment. As well as being able to do, and knowing what to do, members of such teams are ‘allowed and enabled to do’. This attribute can best be described as a state in which the members of the team are most efficiently and effectively able to pair their talents with the team’s objectives. As importantly, high-performing teams will have cultural settings that empower all members - especially the most junior. The vibe will be one of “here I can take some risks and be recognized and rewarded for personal flair and effort’. Also importantly, it will also have members feeling that “whilst the job may be hard (premier standards to meet) this is an easy place to work”. So, in true team spirit we each got decked out for our individual night runs, dressed in headlamp, tail light, reflective vest and all. With the night runs started, you realize you have crazy adrenaline and that night runs are the best thing you have ever done.

Attribute 4 - Alignment

Members of a high performing team, well along the high performing team journey are talented, have clarity of intent and are also fully-enabled to get on and deliver their role; further, however, they undertake what is expected of them because they ‘believe it is right to do so’. This attribute is such, is all about value compatibility between the team’s values, the team leader’s values (which can often shape the former) and those of each member. It is an unfortunate reality that many people, even those within teams that have a first appearance of high functionality, are not fully subscribed to the collective values of the team. That is, their personal values are at odds with the team’s values or, even, the team’s fundamental reason for being. In high performing teams, there is no sunlight between the espoused team values, the actual team values and the collective (often private) values of its constituent members. Being in a van with five other people for 30 hours straight gets you really close, really fast.

Attribute 5 - Passion

Next up, in this progression to truly extraordinary team behaviors is the ethereal, but very real, attribute of passion. Simply put (and you are probably getting the gist of this logic now!), members of a high performing team can do, know what to do, are allowed/enabled to do, believe it is right to do and, further, ‘would love to do’. When you see teams with this quality, you see members prepared to make their contribution to the team effort not out of any coercive fear of failure but, rather, because they are infected by the collective energy and pride. Their own efforts are fueled to extraordinary levels by a deep sense of being part of something special and bigger than them and an association they cherish and are manifestly proud of.

Attribute 6 - Togetherness

As a team, we collectively crossed the finish line approximately 32 hours after starting and had reached peak “togetherness!” This is the most-elusive attribute for any high performing team. The ‘Holy Grail’ end of being a high performing team is the point at which you can claim you have arrived at Tribal status. In such teams, not only do you have exemplar engagement and behaviors from all constituent members but that final piece of ‘social glue’ - individuals motivated also by the very company of their team colleagues. This is the zone where intra-relationships are defined by shared levels of high professional respect and, indeed, deep friendships. Team members bearing this attribute scale even greater heights (sometimes literally!) because not only are they passionate about what they do (as built on all the preceding qualities) but it is this comradeship that sits at the very nexus of this passion. There is no place they would rather be than with the companionship of their comrades and with this fellowship, a sense of collective invincibility. For such teams, there is a mindset of “anything together”; that is, “together, anything is possible”. In this vein, as soon as we had finish our third and final run, and realize that it’s over you meet your final runner with the rest of your team to cross the finish line together and it is the ultimate moment. And then you realize that even though your body kind of hates you and your brain feels like mush you're hooked on this crazy mix of running, team-building, and modern-day survival that is a Ragnar Relay.