I am feeling stabby and want to kill him. Several weeks ago, he asked me and a colleague to organise an awayday for our team. He said it should build on the last one. OK, we said, we can do that, but people will want some fun activities as well. He, and another colleague, have emailed us a vast list of "helpful" suggestions as to what we might do on the awayday. We realised there were some politics here, so said yes, how helpful, we will look at these and see what we can come up with.
We came up with several options for the day using the Shit Sandwich approach - a fun, team building warm up exercise, which will take around 45 minutes, then a quick coffee break, and onto the next exercise, which is his serious work one, finishing with a fun, but relevant activity after lunch.
He has vetoed every single fucking suggestion we have come up with, both for the fun activities and the serious bit in the middle. We are now a week away from the awayday, and I cannot tell you how much time we have wasted on this, as he won't consider ideas, but wants concrete plans, set out in writing.
We have come up with what we thought was a good plan, still using the Shit Sandwich approach. I have emailed him to tell him our latest suggestion which is exactly what he said he wanted for the serious bit. I have said that I don't want to divulge details of the two "fun" exercises, as it is important that everyone comes at these "blind" and doesn't have time to think about them.
I've just got an email (yes, sent this evening). He has vetoed our serious activity and has said we don't seem to have thought about Susan's suggestions. We did think about them, but Susan is as mad as a box of frogs and her suggestions were too. He has also vetoed our "fun" parts to the day, unless we can tell him concretely what they involve.
We have one week to go.
AIBU to tell him to shove the whole thing up his arse and he and Susan can come up with something between them.
And then to crack his fucking head open with an axe and leave the building?
AIBU?
I am about to explode with my boss
FuckingWonderwoman · 14/11/2012 19:58
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On the topic of dreadful awaydays my old company had the worst EVER. So bad it made the national newspapers!
Basically as the culmination of a day of training about management courage and teamwork they had arranged for a 'walking on hot coals' finale. The sales director had done it once and said it was brilliant. The problem was he had done it on a beach. Nice warm dry sand underneath. They chose to replicate it in a wet field. Apparently if you walk on hot coals with wet feet all the hotcoals on the top stick to the soles of your feet and burn, burn, burn 
so, sales director goes first and toughs it out to the end. At some point he must have realised it was wrong and not like his last experience but he didn't say anything as it had been his idea.
Despite him having 3rd degree burns at the other end the rest of the team followed! All the sales guys were in full competitive flow and had to show their mettle (or something, who knows why the hell people do stupid things sometimes). In the end i think about 6 or 7 guys did it. They all ended up in hospital, with third degree burns so it's sort of not really funny. But then it sort of is too, in a darwin awards kind of way. The worst off was the guy who was in so much pain he put his burning feet in the loo. He ended up with septisemia 
. bizarely he was the head of research and development. Basically a scientist. Which makes his decision re the loo especially mad.
I don't normally go in for gender stereotypes but yes, they were all men. I think it really does sometimes take testosterone to achieve quite such stupidity.
So wonderwoman how's that for a new plan? Fun fun fun!
There's definitely room for a team bonding exercise in here. Or maybe a generic (theoretically serious) group discussion on 'leadership traits and management training' 
in which you identify
a) which companies/competitors are doing well in your field
b) what they do differently (this is where you suggest 'management and development structures')
c) how you can implement some of these internally....
If that's too subtle, a group bonding initiative in which you throw rotten tomatoes at the boss could be good :)
ThinkAboutItTomorrow that is the stupidest, craziest thing I've heard in at least a week! I'm wincing just thinking about it.
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Message withdrawn at poster's request.
Another at ThinkAboutItTomorrow's story!
I don't understand away days. A former boss organised one at a spa (all female team) that was utterly pointless and got her in trouble with the trustees so she tagged on a brainstorming exercise at the end then threw a bit of a sulk when her lack of structure meant we didn't know what we were meant to do. It struck me at the time that she probably didn't have many friends and hoped a girls day out would make us all magically bond. Funnily enough it just made us feel really uncomfortable.
My DP worked with a load of Finns once and they took him to a sauna as a team build. Sounds innocuous enough doesn't it? Now picture yourself sitting in a sauna with your colleagues drinking vodka. Now realise you are all stark bollock naked........
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Horrible Bosses - I'd forgot what a brilliant film that is! But don't watch it OP, it'll only give you ideas.
Someone mentioned marshmallow and spaghetti towers......ha, ha, I inflicted that on a load of guys I work with as a conference "warm up" (I planned it but wasn't there, thank goodness). Being nerdy engineers, most of them got seriously stuck into competetive tower-building, although a couple of teams just went "sod that", and ate the marshmallows.
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