Team Effectiveness Exercise

The Personal Stories exercise is a great way to dip your toes into building trust across your team.? When the team is ready to ready to dive into the messy work of being vulnerable and giving honest feedback, give the Team Effectiveness Exercise a try:?

Team Effectiveness Exercise

What's it for? To give team members a chance to provide each other with focused, direct, and actionable feedback on how they can improve the team's performance.

Time needed: One or two hours, depending on team size and facilitator skill.

Instructions:

1. Everyone answers the following questions about each other member of the team:

• What's their biggest strength that helps the team?
• What's their biggest weakness that hurts the team?

(Note: Write down your answers so you remember them and don't change them based on what others say.)

1. Starting with the team leader, everyone reads their positive comments one by one.? It’s imperative that you set the tone by having the leader start first.??
2. The leader responds to the comments (e.g., "Any surprises? Anything you want clarified?").? Don’t be surprised if team members try to give you low level examples of your biggest weakness, and be ready to ask them to go deeper!??
3. Still focusing on the leader, everyone reads their answer to the biggest weakness one by one.? These can be difficult to hear and it’s important you don’t shut the team down by being dismissive of team members’ answers.
4. Repeat this process for every team member.
5. After everyone receives feedback, each person summarizes their one or two key takeaways that they'll work on and emails them to the leader.

Next Steps: At the next team off-site, everyone reports on their progress and gets feedback from the team.

Source: This exercise is from Lencioni's book, Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a Field Guide.

#Leadership #Trust #TeamBuilding #OrganizationalHealth The Table Group