A New Recipe for Success:
Team Building Moves into the Kitchen and Your Volunteer Program
Susan Moscareillo, CVM
Editor, ManagingVolunteers.com
July 5th, 2004

Every good manager wants their employees to function as an affective team so they will reap greater success and greater rewards for their employer.

You want to recruit volunteers to prepare a meal for the clients of your nonprofit. (Or you're a member of a nonprofit agency looking for a good team building exercise.)

If you've been approaching local businesses and telling them how valuable your agency is to the community and what a great benefit their employees can be to your clients, you're probably not having a high success rate with your altruistic approach.

Give local businesses what is "hot" and get better results -- and the place to do it is in the kitchen. The trendiest business attire in the world of team building today is the apron.

There are entrepreneurs making big profits teaching team building by bringing employees of corporations, large and small, together to make a meal.

Well, you can offer this opportunity for free. Write a new "sales" brochure and title it: "A New Recipe for Success: Building Your Team in Our Kitchen" and advertise the benefits of cooking at your agency as a team building session for local businesses.

Your brochure about team building should illustrate how preparing a meal together (or doing any other service activity on-site at your agency) will help employees of a business learn and improve characteristics of a successful team. These characteristics include:

(1) Unified Sense of Purpose

Cooking a meal together offers an opportunity for departmental teams to work together in a relaxed, non- competitive way -- to see each other as people, not just co-workers.

(2) Productivity

It builds connections between managers and employees as well as between departments. It
encourages improvement of problem solving skills.

(3) Achievement of Empowerment

Employees can learn new skills and assume responsibility for their part of the meal. It adds an
experimental aspect to employees working together, and gives people who have never worked
together before the opportunity to do so.

(4) Effective Communication

Communication is practiced and fostered as the meal is planned, created and served.

(5) Individual and Group Feeling of Satisfaction and Accomplishment

It offers the opportunity for immediate gratification and feedback among co-workers as they
complete the project. It encourages employees who may not have exhibited leadership potential to do so and succeed in a new setting.

Cooking together is a team-building exercise that works. At our Baltimore Ronald McDonald House, I have seen groups of co-workers -- whether the lawyers and staff of Tydings and Rosenberg or the enthusiastic employees of athletic wear company UnderArmour -- build lasting bonds as they fry chicken and peel potatoes together. They feel so positive about their accomplishment of preparing and serving a meal that they often return. They exhibit pride in their individual and group accomplishments, bringing cameras and taking group photos, leaving recipes for our families and posting articles about their meal at our House on their company website.

Should preparing a meal not be a suitable project for your agency, the same principles will apply to any service project embarked on by employees of a local business.

If you're looking for more ideas and suggestions on effectively "selling" your volunteer program to the public, see "Selling the Volunteer Program: It All Begins With You" in our Archived Articles section on this site.

Send us your ideas and team building success stories so we may share them with other managingvolunteers readers!