Every company has an org chart. It’s great at showing who reports to whom — less helpful when it comes to who actually gets along. The best connections at work tend to skip levels entirely: the new hire and the director who turn out to have the same sense of humor, the mentor and mentee who bond over a shared hometown. That’s the fun part of team building across hierarchy. When the game starts, seniority takes the afternoon off, and the connections that form are the ones an org chart would never predict.
What the Org Chart Misses
When Mentor Meets Mentee
Recently, we ran two events built specifically around mentor/mentee programs — our Field Day for one client and our Game Show for another. Both put pairs from different levels on the same teams, and the difference from a typical peer event was immediate.
For one thing, the dynamic between a mentor and mentee isn’t the same as the one between peers. Instead, there’s a built-in gap — in experience, in tenure, and sometimes in plain confidence. A junior team member often hesitates to speak freely around someone several rungs up the ladder. During a normal workday, that gap rarely closes.
Play closes it fast, though. A few rounds into our Field Day, we watched as the usual stiffness fell away — you can’t stay formal while tied to someone at the ankle in a three-legged race. Likewise, during the Game Show, mentors and mentees were shouting answers and talking over each other as equals. A coffee chat or a formal check-in can take months to reach that point. A game gets there before lunch.
Why Play Works When Meetings Don't
So why does play do what a meeting can’t? Mostly, it comes down to the starting line. In a meeting, rank enters the room first. People wait for the senior voice, defer to it, and shape their own input around it. In a game, that hierarchy simply doesn’t apply. Nobody is a VP during a relay race, and titles don’t make anyone funnier, faster, or better at trivia.
This is exactly where one of our core values earns its keep: it’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how. The fun isn’t the point on its own — it’s the mechanism. Specifically, the right kind of structured play strips away the hierarchy that normally governs who talks to whom. Once that’s gone, people connect as people. Better yet, those connections outlast the event itself.
Building Connection on Purpose
The mentor/mentee events reinforced something we’ve seen repeatedly: meaningful connections form faster when leadership participates alongside everyone else. In a lot of companies, the senior team does everything right on paper — they greenlight the budget, block the calendars, pick the activity, and make sure everyone else shows up. Then, when the day arrives, they hang back and watch. However, the connection happens on the field, not from the sidelines. Leaders who stay in planning mode miss the entire point — so they have to get in it too.
The real lever is how you build the teams. Rather than letting the senior people cluster together, split them evenly across the groups. That way, every team gets a mix of levels instead of one stacked with directors and another with new hires. Done right, the whole company leaves more connected than it came in — and stays that way long after everyone heads back to their desks.
Give Your Org Chart the Afternoon Off
Your org chart isn’t going anywhere — and it shouldn’t. But it could use an afternoon off now and then.
At Grin Events, our genuinely fun team building experiences bring every level of your organization together, turning a chart full of titles into a room full of teammates. If you’re looking to strengthen connections across departments, generations, and leadership levels, contact us today— we’d love to help!
