1. How well do your team members know themselves and each other?
One team exercise that I particularly like and guarantees excellent results every time is the Johari Window to enhance the individual's perception of others.
- People always want to hear what others think about themselves.
- People open up their minds when talking about personal stuff.
- People look for ways to understand their relationship with themselves and others.
So try to follow these steps:
1. Present the model to the team
2. Each team member writes up to 3 things about themselves in the OPEN area.
3. Each team member moves the things they did not know about others in the HIDDEN area.
4. Each team member writes 1-2 things about all other teammates in the BLIND area.
5. Each team member moves the things that match their perception of themselves in the OPEN area, leaving the surprising ones in the BLIND area.
6. Each team member could fill the UNKNOWN area with their assumptions and desires about themselves, things they have never tried before.
The bigger the Open Area, the better cohesion we get.
Such activities can focus on feedback, shared discovery, self-disclosure, and self-discovery to help the team develop understanding and grow together.
2. What glue keeps your team together and helps them work in complete agreement?
Team values and norms are the glue keeping different personalities working in unison and directly impacting delivery results. Investing in values, norms and agreements now will save you from many mistakes and attempts to fix the results later on.
So if you want to know your team state now, use the High-Performance Tree exercise to evaluate how strong those are and what exactly needs to be improved.
Get the answers to these three questions, and draw your tree:
- What are our roots (values)?
- What are our leaves (norms)?
- What fruits do we see (actual results)?
This simple exercise will clearly show where your roots are weak, what norms you have to work on, and whether you see any results.
3. Do you know why your team exists?
Sometimes teams create documents like working agreements that include only the events and practices used. One obvious thing they are missing is how they "sell" themselves to the company.
Making a Pitch Deck is a great way to showcase your hard work, but it also challenges you to simplify complex concepts. It requires you to create a narrative about what you do, why you do it, how to do it, and what success looks like.
So the pitch deck might consist of the following slides:
- Team structure (and why we are organized this way)
- Our why - the team mission statement
- Problem/ solution we try to address in the work we produce
- Goals we want to achieve
- Success metrics we gather to evaluate our work
- Operational rhythm - our process to keep the continuous value flow
- Information on key pivots /changes/improvements we'll be making
The first exercise to start with here will be to create the team mission statement if you want to nurture a strong focus and commitment.
There are three questions to be answered: What do we do? How do we do it? Why do we do it?
Hope you found it helpful :)
===
Whenever you're ready, there are 3 other ways I can help you:
1. Follow me on Linkedin to get daily tips on #agile, #team coaching, #scrum master growth, #agile leadership, #agilecoaching #culture
2. Work with me 1:1 to grow in your Agile leader role or help your team and company grow.
3. Join the Agile Team Coaching Program: A targeted coaching- facilitation system to help Scrum Masters and Agile Leaders to identify team hidden obstacles and turn those into a growth plan in 30-60 days.