During a particularly weird HR intervention at a branch office I worked at, all the managers were required to sit through a team building exercise where we were handed crayons, construction paper, glitter, markers and other kindergarten craft tools, and required to create some kind of personal expression and share the result with each other.<p>The intervention was in response to some big attrition and rage quits on the engineering team, and a general disconnect between that office and the rest of the company. Forgetting for a moment that a group of adults had to create these objectively demeaning expressions and then present what the glitter or animal stickers represented to each other, and to an exec with hire/fire authority, HR collected the artifacts at the end of the session - and when we returned to the office the next day, they were hung on the walls for all the managers' staff to see what we had accomplished on a day long retreat while everyone was under immense deadline pressure to ship features. One engineer saw these pathetic clusters of multi coloured clutter taped to the walls and with the horror of someone whose invested career so far depended on performance reviews from said managers, she asked, "seriously, what the hell is this?" We had pissed off eng staff to begin with, but what the exec team thought we needed was a kind of coup de grace to utterly discredit managers as men and women in front of the people whose livelihoods depended on their leadership.<p>Since then, what I have come to think these exercises are is a test of supplication, and of whether you can convincingly and competitively debase yourself better than your next peer. It was a kind of race to the bottom to demonstrate how sincerely you could erase your humanity and individuality in service to the narrative of a team, and what you were willing to do to survive. I've even come to suspect it's a system, where they take average people with impostor syndrome, make them debase and humiliate themselves in front of others, and then leverage the shame of the exercise into a new cruelty and compensatory sadism to squeeze out marginal effort from their staff. Now when I see glitter and crayons, I am reminded of how they tried to teach me to hate.