Team Building | Joan LeMahieu

Episode Transcript of: Team Building | Joan LeMahieu

Alan
Welcome back. And with Joan LeMahieu, who here at currently the Director at City Beach. John, welcome to today’s show.

Joan LeMahieu
Thank you, Alan. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Alan
So John, can you tell me about yourself?

Joan LeMahieu
Well, that’s a wide open question. I grew up in an immigrant family on a small farm in British Columbia. And I was so fortunate, you know, we talked a little bit about mentors before we started the show today. And I’ve got to say my mother was my first mentor. Although she had a seventh grade education in the Netherlands. She sat my sister and I down when we were six or seven years old, and said, you know, you girls can go to college. Well, she hadn’t even been to high school. And unbeknownst to me, she and my dad on very, very limited funds, were supporting a couple of their brothers and sisters as they pursued their careers in college. So I immediately decided I was going to be a school teacher. And my sister decided she was going to be a nurse. I mean, what else are you going to do in the late 50s, early 60s with, you know, role models of women in teaching and nursing physicians. So I announced to my second grade teacher, the very next day that I was going to be a teacher. And she was sitting in her blue dress on the piano bench, and she just about fell off the piano bench, I swear, because I was actually getting an X in behavior, which is somewhere below you for unsatisfactory. And I’m sure she thought I was heading for juvenile hall instead of to be a teacher. But that little dream actually propelled me through grade school. And through high school, when actually, you know, a number of my friends were dropping out of high school, very, very blue collar growing up. And it propelled me through high school and propelled me to make a decision to go to a small college affiliated with our church in Iowa, as I read in one of our church bulletins, that they had a 98% placement rate for teachers. And I thought, well, that means that I’ll get a job when I get out of there. So I went to a small college, I graduated, and I taught for one year 26, darling, fourth graders. And I tell my friends, God blessed every child whose life I have not touched in the last 35 years. So I taught for one year and then really went back to I think which to, to, to the business world, I had helped my dad with the business on the family farm, I worked a lot of hours in a local bank to help fund my way through college. And I really enjoyed the business side of life. And so I married a gentleman who lived here in California, and decided just to start working temporary jobs and figure out what it was that I would enjoy doing. And I landed in human resources for nine years, and decided that, you know, it wasn’t enough really business, I really liked the whole. I don’t know, you know, make earning money, figuring out the expenses, figuring out the revenues, and really running a business rather than just advising a business. So I was working for a local government at the time, and they needed someone to manage the convention center, and two performing arts theaters. And I jumped at the chance to do that. And it really was very fortunate because I was in a city called Visalia, which was at that point in time known as one of the most entrepreneurial cities in America. And I was given full rein really to manage those businesses. And then I went on to open, Frank Lloyd Wright designed community and Convention Center in Madison, Wisconsin. You might say, well, how in the world did you open that when Mr. Wright’s been dead for 40 years? Well, he had designed it in the 30s redesigned it eight times. And Madison, Wisconsin is a little bit like Berkeley of the Midwest. You know, we talk a lot about things we discuss it’s lots of votes went back and forth. And the community finally voted to open to build the center in the early 90s. highly controversial passed by less than 1% of the vote. We had, and I was hired 14 months before we opened. We had programmed the building for 350 events. And the first year we had 1058 events. Wow. So yeah, wow, was right. So that was a tremendous learning experience. And, you know, we’re gonna talk a little bit about team building today. It really was an amazing group of team leaders that I had on staff that were able to, you know, ramp up from plans and of course, the city was watching us in the community was watching us very carefully to make sure we weren’t making any mistakes. So, and, you know, that team really, really rallied. And it was because we brought in frankly, team builders, we brought in, we did a lot of team building amongst the group themselves. And they created really magic for the city of Madison. And that that center still is a major economic driver for Madison and was the stimulus for recreating their downtown, they’re now building a second third hotel downtown third actually hotel since that, and the downtown has become completely revitalized, which really is exciting when you think that you have a little bitty piece of making a community a better place to live, making it more economically viable. And so I’m kind of proud of that one.

Alan
I’m visiting here today with Joan LeMahieu, who she is executive director at City Beach. And we just been discussing your background, how she got into career and team building. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about the hiring the right people for your organization, how do you go about that? We’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and visiting here today with Joan LeMahieu, who the director of city beach locations in Fremont, and Santa Clara. And, Joan, I want to come back and focus on your, your days and your experience in the HR world. How do you know if you’re hiring the right people for your organization?

Joan LeMahieu
Well, that is a very complex question. One needs to look at what the current team is comprised comprised of the skills and needs of the current team. I think you look at a combination of a person’s technical skills, as well as the fit within the organization, their management philosophy, their leadership philosophy, whether there’s a fit, I mean, you can certainly have people that are fantastically technically inclined, but can will not fit into the organization. Of course, I’m speaking about hospitality organizations, it could be very different in high tech or an engineering firm, or an r&d firm. But when one is looking in the hospitality industry, it’s all about being able to connect with people to welcome people into your venue and to create the systems and products that are very people oriented. So do

Alan
you want you go through a process of in your screening process, a checklist or a scoring system? Or how do you how do you go about, you’ll get 50 resumes over the Internet email today so convenient for people to just kick the resumes? And how do you how do you score these resumes? Or do you?

Joan LeMahieu
Well, at City Beach, because we are a small business, we basically do it by hand, we review each of the resumes, and we really put them in, you know, the literally the three stacks, the ones that look most promising medium ish, and then ones that just do not have the qualifications. And I’d like to say that we do some sophisticated testing, we do not at City Beach, as most small businesses do not those kinds of tests need to be they need to be well vetted. And you also need to have a great nexus between what the job is and what the test is. And often that takes a lot more sophisticated measurement tools than what is available to a small business. But I’ve been involved in larger businesses where absolutely we did you know, personality assessment instruments. And again, it was more scientifically geared to the position,

Alan
do you end up hiring the right person for the wrong position? Sometimes

Joan LeMahieu
that’s been done? Yes. And if you can shift the person around in the business, that’s a good thing to do. And sometimes you just need to say, You know what, I made the wrong decision. Let’s be really, really clear. Let’s be humane. Let’s be kind. Whenever you have to let someone go, you know, they have to go home to their family and talk with their family about it. And you want to make sure that they leave with their ego intact and with hope that there’s something better for them in the future. And so I think the out outbound counseling is huge. When you make a mistake, I think owning up to mistake is important rather than blaming the person who you’ve brought in?

Alan
So what do you recommend that a company do when looking to fill a position in organization with the right individual?

Joan LeMahieu
I think you have to have a clear set of skills, not that a clear set of what it is that your expectations are, what is the job description? What are the skills, knowledge and abilities that you’re looking for? Have that very clearly set, and then work with the rest of the team. When you’re doing your interviewing process, different people on the team will see different aspects of a person and then pulling that together and making a group decision is hugely important and don’t ever, in my opinion, forget what the front desk person’s opinion is of the candidate as they walk in the door. How do they treat that front desk person? How do they react in the environment when they think they’re not on stage? Some powerful observations have been made. And I’ve, you know, I think, made the right decision by not hiring someone because of the way they treated the front desk.

Alan
Amazing here with today with Joan LeMahieu, who she’s executive director at City Beach. And, Joe, we need to take a quick break. When we come back. I want to talk about team building. We’ll be right back after these messages.

Alan
Welcome back and biz. I’m here today with Joan LeMahieu the executive director at City Beach with locations in Fremont and Santa Clara. Now, John, I understand that city beach, at City Beach, you offer team building skills to organizations, how’d that come about?

Joan LeMahieu
Well, organizations in order to be most effective, that people really need to work together. And so we have a fantastic sports entertainment venue at City Beach, we really focus on person to person interaction in all of our games and activities. And so it was a naturally to create team building experiences for corporations. We do over 350 team building events every year for corporations in the Bay Area.

Alan
You know what, why are team building activities important for a company?

Joan LeMahieu
Well, I go back to the days when I was asked to head up the opening of Ford Field home for the Detroit Lions hired 14 months before we opened and had to build a team right from scratch. And if you don’t spend time together outside of the work environment, either in facilitated activities or more fun and play, I think it makes the team less effective. And so we did a lot of that at Ford Field, bringing people together in small groups and doing some team building working with a facilitator working on our communication skills, change management skills. And then you know, When the time gets tough, because you go through stressful times as a team, you can always sort of come back to what it was like when you were more relaxed and having a good time with that person. And I think you then give your teammates a little bit more leeway as you work through to get the job done.

Alan
You know, the et Cie between these talked about 350 to 350 activities, quite a number but give me some idea of what are some of these activities that you refer to?

Joan LeMahieu
Well, it can be anything as fun as doing an extreme chef. Exercise together we take a group and we break them into three or four small groups we give them chef hats and Chef aprons and a lot of food and a stove to work on. And they get to create a meal for for each other and they get to judge each other’s meals and it’ll do it for creativity for taste for innovation. And it’s another way of just getting together and having some fun or we have some more technical team building training we have a high ropes course a low ropes course and you actually spend time talking about communication, teamwork, trust, depending on each other. As you you know, climb up 30 feet above the floor and help each other across Ay ay ay stin thin steel cable. I mean, it sounds almost impossible. But really it’s about trust. It’s about teamwork. It’s about communication and you To make amazing things happen,

Alan
sounds like you got a lot of fun in that facility.

Joan LeMahieu
We do we do. And you know, sometimes teams just need to just sort of kick back and enjoy each other. And so there are a lot of games that they can. They can do either facilitated by our professional facilitators, they can just come on in and hang out and play pool will play ping pong, badminton, dodgeball, volleyball, basketball, there’s just a Bochy, there’s just a great, great variety of things to do. Or if they just want to come out and, and hang out and have a beer on the patio. That’s another option

Alan
there. What’s the typical size of the group that you have there?

Joan LeMahieu
You know, we really do a wide variety of groups anywhere from 12 to I’m gonna save three or 400. And we’ve actually had, you know, actually 1200, but you asked for a typical size, so it’s about 12 to 300. Although we can certainly do larger groups and have

Alan
when people come to you, do you notice a change of before and after, when they did these? Well, ivities people keep

Joan LeMahieu
coming back to us. We have many, many companies that return sometimes every month with different groups, that tells us that indeed, our team building is effective, we don’t have the luxury of being in the workplace before the team building happens and in the workplace afterwards. Certainly the anecdotal stories tell us that it is a fact of it makes a difference. And the repeat the fact that we have so many people that come back over and over and again, year after year, tells us that it’s it makes a difference.

Alan
So for a company coming down, how much time should they schedule, you can schedule anywhere

Joan LeMahieu
from two to six hours, and some people will come for an entire day, some people do two or three days, it depends on how much diagnostic work they want to do on site, and how much how deep they want to get. And, you know, we can do a wide variety, I would say the average is probably a four to five hour event.

Alan
When we look at the the organizations obviously every organizations are made up of different people different personalities and and trying to get people unified, not always easy. But how do you encourage cooperation and collaboration among employees in an organization? Well, at

Joan LeMahieu
City Beach, we spend time with our clients before the event, we ask them questions about what it is that they would like to accomplish. And if the issue is, you know what, we’re just exhausted, we’re getting at each other’s throats. Because we’re all just so tired, and we haven’t had time to spend together to enjoy each other, then we’ll do a real light hearted fun activity. If it’s more like, you know, we’re heading into this r&d project. And we really have to get to know each other and trust each other and learn how to work together or we’re going to be doing a massive project together. And we’ll we’ll design a different exercise for them. We’ll design maybe three or four, a series of three or four exercises. One might be to encourage trust, one might be to encourage commute different ways of communication. I mean, it’s well known fact that communication amongst teams is the number one criteria for success. You can have teams with an enormous amount of individual talent. But if there isn’t great communication amongst the group, the team is not as effective as they can be.

Alan
Yeah, Joan, individuals that are interested in bringing their companies down to City Beach. How do they contact you? What’s the process so

Joan LeMahieu
people may reach us either by going onto our website at City beach.com or calling us at 510651 2500?

Alan
That’s 510 651 2500. At City Beach.

Joan LeMahieu
We have events every Saturday for the family called family fun night. And we have are open seven days a week for lunch and for dinner. A great, great opportunity to hang out on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday play a little Bochy, out in our courtyard. It’s just really a lovely, lovely space.

Alan
I’ve been visiting here today with John LeMay, who has executive director of City Beach. John, thank you for being on today’s show.

Joan LeMahieu
Thank you, Alan.

Alan
We’ll be right back after these messages.

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This transcript was generated by software and may not accurately reflect exactly what was said.

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