Professional Co-Strangers

Situation: You’re a large company with disparate business units spread across vast territories.

Challenge: You want to present a united front at your tradeshows, but your booth staff doesn’t know each other.

Result: Attendees sense this disarray, and the organization you thought projected the image of a vibrant city of co-workers, is perceived as a disjointed city of co-strangers.

This happens more often than you’d think, even in mid-sized companies. This blog, then, offers a few examples of activities we call “ice-breakers” that can help transform a group of individuals into a unified team.

And so it begins…

At a typical internal pre-show meeting, staffers sit with their respective business units while a representative from each provides an overview of its specific products and strategy. At the end of the meeting, everyone grabs lunch … and sits with members of their own business units.

At the tradeshow, this insularity finds its way onto the show floor, and the dynamic between booth reps devolves into a middle-school dance.

A “family” of products and solutions indeed.

Despite the advances of our hi-tech age, face-to-face interaction remains the best way for prospects and sales reps to get to know one another. This is also true for internal staff, and there’s no better way to support this than providing a few fun “ice-breaking” activities.

Here are two we’ve used to great success.

Ice-breaker #1: Name Tag Stories

  • A few weeks before the tradeshow, staffers provide three responses to this question: “Most people would never guess from looking at me that I_______________.” E.g. “I taught the hula in Ukraine;” “I was crowned Miss Bowden Dairy Products.”
  • Choose your favorite of the three and include this information on their nametag:

Don Veller

Escaped from a broken

elevator in a bathrobe

  • Make three copies of each “fun fact” on small slips of paper–sans the staffer name–and collect them in a bowl.
  • At your internal pre-show event, staffers wear their very personalized name tags  and draw three additional “fun facts” from the fishbowl.
  • Their task: Find the three people whose “fun facts” match the ones they chose.
  • When they do, they must each share details of their personal “fact.”
  • Staffers may also be prompted to share their stories with the entire group.

This exercise provides a wonderful opportunity for people to meet their (unknown) co-workers in relaxed conditions, and to have their conversation-starters provided for them.

Ice-breaker #2: Perfect Partners

We recently facilitated this icebreaker for McKesson, a healthcare IT solutions leader. They wanted their HIMSS2015 tradeshow team to appear as a unified organization with a “360 degree perspective to help customers navigate their journey in value-based care.”  This entailed bringing together five business units, for a total of 150 people, who would be staffing the demo stations in their exhibit.

  • At the pre-show meeting we distributed 6×9 index cards at random.
  • Each card had a well-known “combo” printed on it; e.g. “Mom & Apple Pie,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Forgive & Forget,” “Pizza & Beer,” “Movers & Shakers,” “Life & Liberty.” This reinforced the idea idea that, like these combos, McKesson’s business units belonged together.
  • The task: Find the other two people in the room who held the same “combo” card.
  • Once all combo groups were found, each group was given 10 minutes to discuss the three questions shown on a monitor at the front of the room.
  1.     What customer problem(s) is your business unit focused on solving and what is your role in that?
  2.     What or who are you excited to see, show or experience at the show?
  3.     Where was your dream vacation or where WILL it be?
  • At the end of 15 minutes, each person was given 15 seconds to share their answers with the entire room.

This was a fun and challenging activity and generated a great deal of laughter. It also served to educate everyone about different aspects of their extended enterprise..

Of course, there are many other ways to “break the ice” with your internal team, and we hope these two examples give you some food for thought.  If you use them, please let us know how they turned out!