Time to personal map!

Hello again! Yesterday I mentioned Personal Maps when I was talking about the Moving Motivators, so, today I’ll talk about how I’ve used the Personal Maps in my team!

Personal Maps is a quick and fun way to team build. For this game everyone needs to fill a template with information regarding some key areas of their life’s, the newest template contains: Education, Work, Family, Hobbies and Values; the one I used with my team had one extra area we called Curious facts. Each person fills them with, at least, two information’s for each area and then explain it to the rest of the group, some time to make comments or questions to deepen the moment of knowing each other is welcome! A team that knows each other is more likely to have a better work environment and create a great work system!

I’ve used Personal Maps as both a team building and get to know my new team activity, as I was joining them as a Scrum Master/PO last year. It seemed like a good way to know more about them and to present myself, softening my entry process. I also used it as a kind of documentation to onboard new team members, replaying it sometimes.

I’ve gathered all the team members on a virtual meeting, presented the Miro board with the template and explained the idea behind the Personal Maps. I gave about 5 minutes so everyone could fill up their post-its and then I’ve presented mine using 3 minutes. During this time, I explained my personal maps and answered some questions people had, we followed the same formula for each person (we were in group of 7). As new members came in during the year, we presented the previous session to onboard them, I played with the new members and told my team they could look up the Miro board and asks questions to the new members.

Personally, I enjoyed a lot the personal maps session, and I also enjoy playing it with new members. I found it curious to see that during our play time, some people who were already in the team for months learned new things they would never imagine about each other, such as one being a DJ when he was younger. I think it might work asynchronously using Loom, maybe people can record their personal maps, send it in a group and we could do a thread, or have a Personal Maps Notion, where we keep the recordings, leave comments or questions and, at the same time, have a documentation, not sure if it would be so fun this way. Maybe I’ll try it out and let you guys now!

#management30 #management #teambuilding