It’s not all fun and games – even recreation at an organization has its purpose. In this episode of Veteran Led, John Berry explores the importance of balancing fun activities with productivity and discusses how excessive or mandatory fun can impact employee morale and overall effectiveness.
Welcome fellow veterans. From the tip of the spear to in the rear with the gear, I went from active-duty Infantry to reserve-component logistician. I’m your host, CEO, entrepreneur, trial lawyer, and Lieutenant Colonel Retired, John Berry. The military lessons that I learned helped me grow an eight-figure business that has maintained consistent annual double-digit growth, landing on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America every year for the past seven years, and has allowed me to continue to serve America’s heroes.
Welcome back to Veteran Led. On today’s episode, we’ll talk about mandatory fun. How much is too much? If you served, you remember mandatory fun. And even if you didn’t serve, you remember those mandatory work social events we’ve all either enjoyed or suffered through company picnics, holiday parties, field days, golf outings, or happy hours. For those of us who are hyper-focused on our mission, we tend to ask, why are we doing this? And is there any real benefit to doing this? Well, building a championship team requires getting to know each other beyond just the function that we serve in the organization. Sports teams, businesses, and especially the military all host mandatory fun events to bring the team closer together.
So it must work, right? Well, here’s the reality check. Time is everyone’s most valuable resource, and well-meaning leaders often squander it with the best of intentions. And I don’t know whether the military or the civilian does this worse. The problem is not the holiday party, the picnic, the sporting event. The problem revolves around the lack of clearly defined purpose behind the event. Notice I did not say lack of planning. Done purposefully, it can be great for retention and recruiting. A great event results in team members getting to learn about each other, posting about the event on social media, and leaving with stronger relationships and deeper respect for one another. A bad result results in team members getting into fights, getting drunk, embarrassing themselves, or worse, being bored to tears and resenting the company for wasting their time again. One mistake I made in the past was I let the senior leadership team plan all of the events and make all the key decisions. The younger team members did not appreciate the string quartet, live band, guest speaker, or the five-course dinner. They just wanted a DJ, a buffet, and an open bar. The problem is you can’t make everyone happy.
An ideal company party for a senior executive may be extremely boring for your junior team members. I can remember several dining inns and dining outs that lasted forever because the senior leaders were so entertained with themselves that they forgot that the rest of us were present and suffering. Knowing that mandatory fun won’t make everyone happy, why do it? Aren’t we doing these events to make team members happy? Well, we can’t look at it that way. All of these events must have a purpose that fit into the company vision. Now, they should make people happy and people should enjoy them, but the reality is these events must fit in the company vision. They must be aligned with where the company is going. So for us, we have huge Veterans Day and Memorial Day events. Why? Because those are in line with our mission of supporting veterans and honoring our fallen comrades. We also use competitions or sporting events to get back to our competitive nature outside the workplace where we can compete with and against each other. We have regularly planned dinners that allow us to socialize and change the environment in which our team interacts and hopefully changes perspective.
We have holiday parties at the end of the year to recognize and celebrate team members in front of their families. And finally, we celebrate the Marine Corps birthday because we have over 20 Marines on our team, and we can’t stop them from doing it. In conclusion, the mandatory fun events should be fun, and they should be enjoyable. But more importantly, they must serve a purpose that fits into your company’s vision. Otherwise, they don’t make sense, and they won’t get you the results that you desire.
After-Action Review. Number one, every mandatory fun event must serve a purpose that furthers the company’s vision. Number two, when you plan the events, plan them understanding that you will not make every team member happy. Number three, when you plan your mandatory fun events, define success. Understand the end state. What will success look like at the end of the event so that you can say either you’re successful or you weren’t, regardless of whether everybody had fun. Three down, the three things I didn’t understand. What may be fun for the senior leaders may not be fun for junior team members. And so it’s important to get the junior team members involved in the planning process.
Number two, if you are going to have a mandatory fun event, make sure it is worth your team member’s time. Do not waste the time of your team members. They’re not here to have fun. They’re here for a mission. And if they can have fun along the way, they’re going to like it. But understand that your job is to not allow them to have fun. Your job is to help them achieve their goals and achieve the mission. Number three, if your team takes the initiative to create their own event or their own celebration, support it. Let them run with it. When our Marines started celebrating the Marine Corps birthday, it was one of the greatest events in the organization because it was a team-led event. And I, as a leader, had nothing to do with it. All I could do was to support it.
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting veteran leadership in business, strengthening the veteran community, and getting veterans all of the benefits that they earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching @veteranled on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
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