When a Team Bucks the Trend: What A Recent Rollerball Event Reveals About Workplace Culture

Every now and then, a team-building activity reveals far more than the participants, or even the client, might initially expect about team and workplace cultures.

Operation Rollerball is one of those activities that can reveal more than people think it will about themselves and their culture.

Sabre has delivered this complex, cross-functional team challenge since the early 1990s. Participants must work together to design, build, test and refine a working solution within a highly time-compressed scenario.

The challenge requires creativity, planning, practical problem-solving, communication and sound decision-making. It also requires teams to stop talking at some point and actually make something work.

Over the years, we have come to view Rollerball as something of a “canary in the coalmine” for team and organisational culture.

The rules have not changed. The timeframe has not changed. The equipment has not changed.

Team performance, however, has.

A Concerning Long-Term Trend

During the past 20 years, we have observed a noticeable decline in the number of teams able to complete the Rollerball challenge successfully, let alone reach its higher scoring levels.

After delivering the activity thousands of times across corporate, government, education, Defence, not-for-profit and small-business environments, the pattern has become difficult to ignore.

Many modern teams possess impressive professional qualifications, technical expertise and organisational resources. Yet all too many now seem to struggle when required to combine those strengths quickly, pragmatically and collaboratively.

Excessive caution can replace experimentation. People can become reluctant to challenge an idea, make a decision or take responsibility. Teams may spend too long seeking perfect agreement, discussing risks or worrying about how their contribution will be perceived.  People in many workplaces can now be overly sensitive when it comes to a need for ‘speaking plainly’ to one another.

In a time-pressured challenge, these cultural habits quickly become visible and impede  a teams ability to collaborate and innovate together.

One Recent Client Bucked the Trend

That is why the performance of one of our recent clients was so encouraging.

Across nine separate teams, every team produced a functioning Rollerball device. Many also achieved scores within bandwidths that have become increasingly uncommon.  This is rare these days.

This was not simply the result of one unusually clever participant or one fortunate team. The capability was evident across the organisation.

The participants combined professional expertise with practical “street smarts”. They communicated directly using a pleasant absence of ‘corporate speak’, tested ideas, adapted when something did not work and remained focused on achieving the collective objective.

They were intelligent without becoming unnecessarily complicated. They were competitive without losing their sense of humour. Most importantly, they appeared comfortable contributing their natural strengths to the task without walking on eggshells.

The result was an excellent example of a capable, grounded and genuinely collaborative workplace culture.

Genuine Culture Beats Performative Culture

Healthy team culture does not mean everyone must agree, behave identically or avoid robust discussion.

Genuine psychological safety allows people to contribute ideas, question assumptions, acknowledge mistakes and offer different perspectives without unnecessary fear. It does not remove accountability, standards or the need to perform.

In fact, real psychological safety should make honest conversations and practical action easier, not harder.

Problems can arise when organisational culture becomes overly manufactured or performative. People may learn the approved language of collaboration while becoming increasingly reluctant to speak plainly, experiment or challenge an ineffective approach.

When team members feel they must carefully mask their natural operating styles to fit an artificial cultural ideal, the team can lose access to some of its most useful behavioural strengths.

Rollerball exposes this quickly. Under pressure, slogans and corporate language provide little assistance. Teams must communicate, decide, build and adapt.

What Strong Teams Do Differently

The teams that perform well are rarely perfect. They simply make effective use of the different strengths available to them.  We often use the Belbin model and its reports to measure this in an evidence-based way.

Some people generate ideas. Others evaluate feasibility, organise the work, maintain momentum, notice errors or ensure the solution is completed properly.

Good leadership creates the conditions in which these contributions can emerge. Team members understand when to lead, when to listen, when to challenge and when to get on with the task.

That is also why evidence-based frameworks such as Belbin Team Roles can be so valuable. Rather than imposing a generic ideal onto every team, Belbin helps identify the behavioural contributions that already exist and provides a practical language for using them more effectively.

A Positive Sign

We sometimes hesitate to draw broader conclusions from a team-building activity. No single challenge can provide a complete diagnosis of an organisation.

However, after more than three decades of delivering Rollerball, unusual results get our attention.

For all nine teams within one organisation to produce working solutions, and for many to reach high-scoring levels, was genuinely impressive.

It suggested the presence of good leadership, practical intelligence, authentic working relationships and a healthy willingness to contribute.

At a time when we increasingly see teams struggle to convert impressive individual talent into effective collective action, it was refreshing to encounter an organisation that bucked the trend.

It was also a reminder that strong workplace cultures still exist, and when they do, the results usually speak for themselves.