The Best Team Building I’ve Ever Watched Happen Was With a Shaker in Someone’s Hand

I’ve done this for twenty years, so let’s just get this out of the way: I have personally supervised a truly staggering number of team development events. I have watched vice presidents build towers out of spaghetti and marshmallows with the grim determination of people defusing a bomb. Nobody has ever once said “that was the best part of the retreat” about a trust fall. Not once. I checked. So when I say I’ve found something that works, and it happens to involve cocktails, I get that the bar is low, so to speak. Bear with me anyway.

Here’s the concept: put a team behind a bar cart, hand them a themed menu, put a light clock on it, and step back. Because the drinks are almost beside the point — what you actually get is a live, low-stakes rerun of everything that already happens on your team, just with better lighting. Someone grabs the shaker without asking anyone’s permission. Someone else quietly starts measuring while two other people debate garnish like it’s a hostage negotiation. A round goes sideways — too much lime, not enough time — and in about five minutes you learn everything you need to know about how this team handles a mistake together. It’s basically a case study in team dynamics that happens to smell like citrus instead of a conference room, which, frankly, is an upgrade no one asked for but everyone appreciates.

That’s the whole idea behind The Teamship Mixology Experience: a three-hour workshop I built for teams on retreat here in South Florida. Small crews build a cocktail-and-mocktail flight together, I narrate the parts worth noticing without turning it into a seminar, and we close with an actual conversation tying it back to how the team runs day to day. I’ve built a career out of leadership development and this might be the most fun I’ve had doing it, which either says something about the workshop or something about the previous twenty years. I’ll let you decide.

One thing I will not be casual about: every cocktail on that menu has a fully built, equally good non-alcoholic twin, made and served right alongside it — not a sad consolation prize someone has to ask for under their breath. I’ve run enough retreats to know exactly what happens when “team bonding over drinks” quietly assumes everyone drinks.

It leaves people out, every time, and nobody says anything because it’s awkward. So: not here. Celebrating, in recovery, pregnant, on a deadline, or just not a drinker — everyone’s building, everyone’s tasting, everyone goes home with the same recipe cards.

If your team’s got an offsite, a retreat, or just an ill-advised work trip coming up to Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, or Tampa, this was built for exactly that. Private sessions only — we don’t mix your team in with strangers off the street — sized for groups of 10 to 16. If you’re curious about what this could look like for your team, email me — info@simetras.co I promise the whole thing will involve significantly fewer marshmallows.