Whether Navy SEALS wisdom translates to a product release, though, isn’t clear. “The question is — is it meant to be fun? Is it meant to be photographed? Or is it meant to be impactful?” Melissa Nightingale, a co-founder of the management training firm Raw Signal Group, said of professional development. “About 75 percent of professional development efforts fall on the floor.”
Still, regardless of how fleeting the benefits, the management machismo keeps spreading, as companies clamor to train their employees in ways that don’t involve a Zoom screen. Like, for example, in a racecar pit.
In Raleigh, N.C., a financial technology company called Constellation Digital Partners brought its employees together — some meeting in person for the first time — to simulate a NASCAR pit stop. The training was facilitated by a company called Over the Wall, which was started by a former NASCAR pit crew coach, Andy Papathanassiou; rates start at $10,000 and vary depending on the size of the group and how much time it spends training.
Constellation’s roughly 30 employees gathered in their office parking lot around a green racecar. The employees took off lug nuts with an air wrench, hoisted off the car’s 50-pound tire, swapped in a new tire and got the lug nuts back on. They were dripping in sweat, sunscreen and grease, looking like the harried pit stop crew members of the Tom Cruise movie “Days of Thunder.”
“It sounds silly for me to say, but the hardest part is actually getting the tire on,” said Kris Kovacs, the company’s chief executive. “What that teaches you is you’ve got to preplan. Hard things, if you practice at them and preplan, become easier and easier.”
Leave a Reply