Accelerate team building with personal maps

How do you improve collaboration in a distributed team? How can we strengthen the team feeling when we as consultants all work in different places? How do you bring people together as a team who haven't known each other for very long and hardly have any opportunities to get to know each other better in personal conversations? These were all questions that affected my team when I was Managing Consultant, back in 2018.?

The growth of every high-performing team progresses through the Tuckman stages of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. As team lead at that time, I made typical observations which proved that we were in the Forming phase, and not just because of some new team members.

• We were a newly formed team, even though half of us already knew each other to some extent.
• In some cases, team members did not know each other at all.
• It was not quite clear, even a bit confusing at first what our connection or our common north star was. Unfortunately, we were not that kind of team working together on a daily basis, guided by a common vision.
• Cooperation among each other was only present on a project basis. There was no common basis that could have fostered lateral support, regular exchange, and knowledge sharing.
• There was not much feedback at team meetings, some were reserved or mostly silent.

During one of our team breakfasts, I introduced the idea of Personal Maps. I invited everyone to create a personal map of themselves in preparation for our upcoming team event. I showed an example and we quickly agreed on topics that we wanted to include there. This was our approach:

1. How or with what the personal map was created was up to everyone.
2. In the middle of the mind map we placed our own name.
3. Around the name we wrote the following categories: Home, Education, Work, Fun, Family, Goals, Values.
4. Next, everyone wrote down what came to mind. There was no right or wrong.
5. On the day of our team event, we put the personal maps on a big whiteboard right at the beginning so everyone could look at them. We just left it like that and didn't do any frontal lecture in front of the others. So it was up to everyone to look at and get the information that interested them. (- And we were all very interested and curious ;-)
6. We took a photo of all the personal maps by mutual agreement and uploaded them in our communication tool, in our MS Teams group.

We didn't run out of conversation material to talk about during the drive to the active part of our team event.

We discovered previously unknown commonalities, got to know even familiar colleagues in a completely different way, and were able to directly talk to new colleagues about interesting points from their lives.

The personal maps were a good exercise in building trust, and trust is essential for a functioning team. In Patrick Lencioni's book "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team", he highlighted why lack of trust is not without reason the most serious dysfunction.

Also, for our new colleagues, the personal maps were a good opportunity to connect and quickly find personal connection in the team.

We honestly benefited from the open way we handled this personal information within our team. When another team member joined us a few months later, the access to our personal maps facilitated the first contact. He also created his personal map and thus offered his new colleagues a welcome invitation to talk to him - away from project-specific topics.

In principle, personal maps are a good way for newly formed groups to get to know each other and facilitate communication and understanding. They are also very suitable as icebreakers especially in remote workshops. Further advantages are:

+ You learn more about the people you work with, directly or indirectly.

+ You only reveal the information about yourself that you voluntarily want to share with others.

+ Building relationships is made easier.

+ The mental distance to others decreases.

I became aware of Personal Maps through Jurgen Appelo's book "Managing for Happiness".

Are you curious? Click here for more insights on the official Management 3.0 website: Personal Maps.