Tale of Two Teams- The Power of Teamwork
Introduction
This is a great exercise if you have been working with your team for some time and have been on a transformational journey. This might, on the surface, seem like a simple ice-breaker, but in practice we have found it requires planning and supreme Active Listening Skills from you and your team. It asks you and your team to reflect on your journey comparing and contrasting behaviours at the beginning to where you find yourselves now. By true teamwork and using some of the techniques in our other ice-breakers to help promote openness and honesty, you can get a real feel of how far your team have come!
How to play
Consider yourselves as two teams. Team A is as you were at the start of your journey, and Team B is your present selves. If you established ground rules when the team formed, think about how these may have changed over time. Compare and contrast the feelings expressed in early meetings to those now. Contrast the communication styles present at early stages to those evident now. Your moderation of this exercise is key, in order to help your team reflect on their journey, by asking open questions and giving them space and opportunity for all to speak and be listened to.
Example questions which you could ask might include:
- How do you work together?
- What is our unifying goal?
- Are we a team?
- Does every team member feel valued?
Traits of the Two Teams
The table below sets out an example of a journey of a team, with observations in terms of components and outputs. Team A were at the start of their journey, newly formed and remotely located. They had yet to really build true trust and camaraderie together. Now contrast the components and outputs for Team B. The transformation in their communication was as a direct result of employing Active Listening and creating Thinking Environments.
Conclusions
You might find some elements from either team example that resonate and help you on your own journey.
These traits can be present in physical teams, however, what should be recognised is that the virtual environment can incubate poor behaviour, and as leaders, we have to recognise the emergence of such disruptive and individualistic motivations and check them. This reflective exercise will help the leader shine a light on the issues.
At the end of this exercise, you may find areas that need further focus, such as building certain Active Listening skills. This is quite normal, and one should remember that your team’s journey is a quest to achieve highly effective communication, it’s not a destination.
One last thought....
Our final recommendation is that you should have this exercise peer-reviewed to help learning and reflect back to the team with more objective observations.