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"Oh geez!" groans Linda Oberdorfer, a delicate chocolate-and- almond cookie crumbling in her hands. Oberdorfer, manager of direct sales for magazine publisher Rodale Press in Emmaus, Pa., is running out of time. She's part of an eight-member sales group that is seconds away from diving into a gourmet meal of its own creation. The group is in the kitchen of the Team Cooking Group, brainchild of New York's Cooking by the Book cooking school and Take Charge Consultants of Downingtown, Pa. They are learning how to deal with limited resources and how to become more cross-functional, goals set by their manager. But for the past two hours the team has focused on whether or not to gratinee and how to chop garlic.
Team members from the rest of the kitchen converge around Oberdorfer to help finish the cookies. Before they started cooking, the group split into two- or three-person teams that would, to their surprise, switch places at the appetizer, entree and dessert stations. The job shuffle was designed to address their boss's desire for them to share tasks better. It wasn't always easy. The first shift had a communications crisis: "The recipe says broil, but the oven's on bake!" (The incoming veggie team hadn't been debriefed on a menu change.)
Counselors provided guidance at each station, helping teams determine how to save time. But guidance was as limited a resource as time and ingredients; the group had help for only one hour to make their two-hour deadline. They had to husband their consulting time to meet the boss's goal of spending money more carefully.
The cookies were done just under the wire. Then the team was ushered out of the kitchen to a dining table, where the meal drew raves from the neophyte chefs. But when it came to meeting larger goals outside the kitchen, there was still work to be done. "We need to be available to one another when our tasks get reassigned on the job," Oberdorfer says. "We have to say, 'This is what you need to know, and this is how you reach me if you have any questions.'" The team agrees to work on that.
Trembling, Lorrie Johnson begins to climb an extension ladder at Calamigos Ranch in Malibu, Calif. On the fifth rung, the 27-year-old traffic coordinator is asked if she has any neck injuries. "I was extremely frightened," she recalls later. An employee of the TV-ad-sales company Adlink, based in Los Angeles, Johnson has already walked a tightrope and shouted strings of nonsense words in a rhythm exercise to a group of colleagues today. Now she's being asked to make a "trust fall" backward off a ladder into the arms of a dozen virtual strangers. Taking a deep breath, she says, "I, Lorrie, choose to fall." And fall she does. "When they caught me, it was such tremendous relief and exhilaration," she says afterward. "I went from fear to excitement. I was proud of myself."