THE HELIUM STICK

---

This leadership team building challenge will let your team experience verbal vs. non-verbal communication, the difference between loud, vocal “leaders” and those who lead by example, and more.

Your motivational speaker and team building programs coach Julius Csizmazia ask the participants to hold a wooden stick on top of their index fingers and lower it to the ground as a team.

Once the teams begin to touch the stick, the challenge will present itself pretty quickly.

The stick is so light that the up-force from each of the fingers trying to stay in contact is greater than the weight of the stick. 

The result?  Immediately, the stick will begin to rise.  

After they struggle for a while, the teams must start to figure out how to work together to get the goal accomplished.

Some team members will try to coach the others by giving verbal instructions like, “No, let’s go down!”

When that doesn’t work, they will get more vocal (because the problem is that everyone just isn’t listening to them, right?), and they will shout, “Down! Down! Down!”

What is interesting is how the group starts to react when the stick starts moving in exactly the opposite direction than the group expects.  Even though the goal is to put it down on the ground, it nearly always starts floating up. At that point, participants start laughing but also blaming each other for the stick’s upward movement. 

The more the stick goes up, the more individuals start blaming each other, and the further away from their goal they get.  In the debrief, this becomes one of the main takeaways: 

Sometimes when our work realities become out of alignment with our individual work expectations, we start pointing fingers and looking for external excuses, and as we do, performance goes down and goals suffer. Certainly, you have seen this happen at work.

Every team member has to keep both index fingers in constant contact with the stick at all times. 

If even a single team member loses contact with the stick for a moment, the team has to start over at chest height again.

The stick can only rest on the side of the index fingers.  

Team members can’t wrap a finger or slide their fingertips over the top of the stick.

They can’t cradle the stick or force the stick down.

Every team member must be standing throughout the challenge.  The starting point is the chest height of the tallest person. 

We have to give this rule or everyone will drop to their knees and try to "bend the rules" right away.

The goal is to lower the stick to about six inches off the ground or all the way down to the floor depending on the physical fitness of the participants.