It is Saturday morning and a team of twenty-something Ghanaian corporate executives are running around, on the manicured north lawn of Labadi Beach Hotel. Each of them is in jeans or shorts with a T-shirt that is thoroughly drenched in sweat. Not a starched shirt, dark suit or a tie in sight.
With no allowances made for the fairer sex, the scene is boisterous and there is a sense of panic and confusion as each person tries to grab as many tennis balls as possible within the allotted one minute time slot. There’s so much screaming and shouting (and indeed foul play) that you could easily forget the players are the decision makers of a respected Ghanaian corporate institution and the scene was being played out at a three hundred dollar plus- a- night hotel.
The architect of this pandemonium –and several others that ensue through the day- is Mark Fairley, a British entrepreneur who makes a living acting like a prat and playing games. When I suggest to Fairley, perhaps a little rudely, that is how I saw what he does for a living, he tells me “Well, my friends will tell you that I am a prat anyway”.
Fairley’s sense of humour and ability to take his work but not himself too seriously is partly what endears him to his largely blue-chip clients who pay to have him fly around the world preaching and demonstrating his unique brand of team building through collaborative games. As Fairley puts it “All over the world, all business is about people. How those people interact determines the success of business. We aim to make teams work effectively for the benefit of the individual and their employer. A win-win”.
Rather than “the death by PowerPoint” approach that so many employ to bore employees to death on a range of subjects, TeamDynamics, the company Fairley set up in 1993, uses experiential games to mirror what happens in the workplace and to provide valuable lessons for teams.
Fairley passionately believes in using "fun as a learning tool" to get results.While the untrained eye watching the executives at Labadi that Saturday may have dismissed them as a bunch of overpaid (and some overfed) corporate executives engaging in rare physical activity to let off steam (and shed calories), there was a lot of science and data crunching behind each of the games that had been developed by Fairley and his team for this particular group.
And at the end of the workshop, Fairley, in collaboration with the team, developed effective, implementable solutions to problems the team had previously identified. As he sees it “The ‘buy-in’ from participants is much greater if they are the source of the solutions”.
The question “Have I thoroughly prepared enough for client?” is what keeps Fairley up at night “as there are no second chances”. Fairley’s obsession with providing a stellar performance for his clients is obvious to me as I watch him in action. He is a hands-on trainer who quickly builds a rapport with his trainees. He’s screaming and yelling with (and often at his trainees) and running often faster and quicker than most.
I am surprised to learn he recently turned fifty and when I comment, he tells me with a serious face “My daughter tells me I have the body of a twenty-year-old but the face of a fifty-year-old”. I learn later that his secret is running every day and he frequently runs marathons. The only luxury he allows himself is his running shoes and curiously, he tells me he would like to die at the end of running a marathon with his as yet unborn grandchildren.
After studying for a degree in Business and Finance at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University), Fairley went to work on the floor of the London Stock Exchange as a trader. He was immensely successful and in his early twenties was hired by a Dutch money markets trader to set up and manage a traded options brokerage on the floor of the London Stock Exchange. Although it was a hugely profitable venture, Fairley was fired after a takeover of the company. Upset, he promised himself that “Never again will some unknown entity fire me”.
Looking back, he admits that sometimes he should have fired himself “for some of the reckless and stupid decisions” he has made but quickly adds “But hey, you learn from the mistakes”.
One such mistake was the business he set up before TeamDynamics – an indoor go-karting track for corporate events in Lisbon, Portugal which he says “was a disaster as the price point was completely wrong and the need was latent: the Portuguese use the motorways as their own personal go-kart track!”
It is Fairley’s second trip in less than six months to Ghana, to facilitate team building training on the invitation of Ghanaian corporates. He believes there is a huge opportunity for professionally facilitated team training delivered in Ghana. His research tells him that currently, in most Ghanaian companies, only a few senior managers are sent overseas for such training “which limits the impact to the fortunate few”.
Fairley, together with his local partner, are investing in a local subsidiary of TeamDynamics to provide in- country training at the highest international standard at a cost significantly lower than it costs to train employees overseas. His aspiration is to create a completely Ghanaian company by training and handing over to a Ghanaian management team. His father, who found about the younger Fairley’s birth while stationed in Tarkwa as an expatriate engineer would certainly approve.
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