Team Up for Adventure

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—On this week’s episode of Convenience Matters, “Creating Strong Teams Can Be An Adventure,” NACS hosts Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives, and Carolyn Schnare, director of strategic initiatives, discuss how to encourage your employees to become extraordinary with Robyn Benincasa, champion adventure racer and founder of Project Athena and one of the keynote speakers at the 2019 NACS Show.

Adventure racing is all about working together as a team. “The interesting part about adventure racing is that in the rules it says every single person [on the team] has to remain within 50 yards of each other from start to finish. If one person on your team quits or gets injured and is out of the race, your entire team is disqualified,” Benincasa said. “As a leader of a business, it is your life…you have all these crazy deadlines, and things are constantly changing, you have a million different checkpoints to get through, and you want to do it better than anyone else in the world, … in that way I say that you’re an adventure racer every single day of your lives.”

For Benincasa, her life as an adventure racer and participant in other sports has taught her that it’s not the setback—it’s the comeback that matters. “When racing, we learned that each of us had our own areas of strength,” she said. “When it was your strong suit, you’re the one who helped others.... and when you’re not in your area of strength, your job is to facilitate the success of everyone else around you.… It’s that unique circle of strengths and challenges that everyone shares. I think in the corporate world, we all like to share our strengths… but I think we have a problem with sharing our challenges. When you have a level of trust you’ve created with your team members, sharing your challenges becomes natural.”

Each week a new Convenience Matters episode is released. The podcast can be downloaded on iTunes, Google Play and other podcast apps, and at www.conveniencematters.com. Episodes have been downloaded by listeners more than 110,000 times in 90 countries.

For more on Benincasa, see “Ultimate Team Player” in the August issue of NACS Magazine.