How Negativity in the Workplace Hurts Your Team

This week, Dale Carnegie Training LA went on a retreat to WISP ski mountain in McHenry, Maryland. There were 11 of us piled into 2 vans. As you can imagine, it was complete mayhem.

I will have many stories over the next couple weeks to share about this team bonding experience, but one in particular stands out. Ironically, this event was completely unplanned.

As we arrived Monday afternoon in the small town of McHenry, it began snowing like crazy. In a 2-mile radius, witnessed 3 cars slam into the guardrail. The roads were getting bad quickly, and I think we were all starting to worry a bit.

As we approached the mountain, we began wondering if we would make it to our house, which was located about 3/4 the way up the mountain. Luckily, we did. If we had arrived 30 minutes later, I might be telling a different story.

Now, I'm pretty lucky. Many people would go into a deep, dark depression at the thought of spending 3 hours in a van with their co-workers, boss, and owners of the company. We all get along though, so it was actually a fun trip!

So, we finally made it to the house which happened to be at the bottom of a fairly steep driveway. Relieved to have made it through the storm, we all jump out of the van - only to realize we are at the wrong house. GREAT!

Back in the van we go to find the right house. Or so we thought. At this point, the driveway was covered in snow and ice - we were completely and utterly stuck.

This is when teamwork and bonding proved to be so much more apparent than just in the office.

We took several different strategies, the first one being to think good thoughts about getting to the cabin safely. For obvious reasons, we needed a bit more than "good thoughts" to help us out of this pickle.

Our next idea was to put most of the weight over the back wheels, so we all piled into the back of the van. Good effort, but no dice.

Then, we saw people pull up at their house next door. They were clearing off their cars with a broom. My co-worker, Mike, asked to borrow it and started sweeping away the snow on the driveway. This definitely helped, but as soon as he would sweep away snow, it would be covered again in just minutes.

After multiple efforts, we get the van about half-way up the driveway. When he realizes we can't move anymore, Stefan slams on the breaks and yells "everybody out, we need a big push!"

(As a side note - the owners of the company pay for us to do Crossfit together. So if there's any group of people you'd want to push your van up a hill, it'd be us.)

Now anyone in their right mind knows this is just plain dangerous and dumb. Good thing none of us are in our right mind because somehow, it worked, and no one got flattened (that would have been an awkward HR meeting).

The thing is, not once did anyone on the team get frustrated or show negativity. Instead, we all stood together to find a solution. We all gave our input, and didn't put each other down when an idea didn't work.

Dale Carnegie's Principle #1 is "don't criticize, condemn, or complain." It's pretty incredible what you can accomplish by following these simple principles.

As you can see, we truly needed the whole team to reach this success.

Shoutout to my team for being strategic and strong!

Push forward each and every day.

Hannah

PS - I was TOTALLY pushing for the first 10 seconds before this video started ;)