How to lead Team Time

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Want to give your established team a better chance of success? The goal is to ensure everyone knows their role, has a shared common goal and learn how to best work together. The Team Time recipe is a curated set of five Workshop Tactics designed to help you unearth the ingredients of an effective team. This recipe will work with vertical, hybrid and in person teams.

🧠 Learn how to…

✔️ set a team vision to work towards

✔️ find your drivers, barriers and goals

✔️ define your roles and responsibilities

✔️ learn about your team members skills & abilities

🃏 Cards used…
📚 Before you start…

In person

  • Prepare (book room, invite people, write and share agenda)
  • Materials (whiteboard, sticky notes, pens)
  • Tech check (charger, adapter, screen projector)
  • Room (refreshments, temperature, chairs, wall space)

Hybrid

  • Prepare (book room, send call link, invite people, write and share agenda)
  • Materials (whiteboard, sticky notes, pens, Miro board)
  • Tech check (charger, adapter, screen projector)
  • Room (refreshments, temperature, chairs, wall space)

Online

  • Prepare (invite people, write and share agenda, create and send call invite)
  • Materials (Miro board)
  • Tech check (charger, adapter, Microphone/headphones)
⏱ How much time?…
  • Over multiple days: one to four short sessions.
  • On one day: two two-hour sessions with a longer break in the middle.
✨ Extra reading…

👀 Let’s walk through this recipe using an example: a doctors’ office that wishes to have better employee turnover rates.

1

Use Newspaper Headline to set a vision to work towards

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⏱ Time: 30 mins

🧠 Core Objective: get the team’s imagination flowing and set an aspirational vision to work towards.

The Newspaper Headline tactic gets you to think about your team’s future by predicting what the press might say about it on their front page. Giving everyone a chance to dream about the future brings to light the true goals of the organisation. From the predictions, you start to define the problems to pursue and which direction to move in. 

💡 Tip: this activity can be done in small groups or individually, depending on the confidence of the individuals.

Instructions

  1.  Since this is the start of your overall workshop, make sure to start with an icebreaker to warm everyone up.
  2. Get each person to draw the template on a portrait piece of paper (or have this pre-set up on the shared Miro board): (3 minutes)
    Newspaper Headline
  3. Explain that the group will be predicting the future and ask them to complete each section with their vision. Explain each section. (20 minutes)


    Break down your predictions as follows:

    Headline: Describe the extraordinary success of the team in one catchy, attention-grabbing headline.

    Subheading: summarise the core of the story in one sentence.

    Sketch: quickly draw an image that showcases the headline in action (stick people encouraged)

    Report: In 3-5 bullet points, detail the highlights of the story. Make sure to address in the bullet points the future they want, the pain points they want changed.

    Quotes: Include some fictional quotes from clients about the accomplishment.

  4. Encourage everyone to share their future vision. Give people a chance to present their newspaper’s key points. As they go, the facilitator can identify common themes that can be condensed into one common goal.
  5. Display all the Newspapers for participants to see and Secret Vote to find the top 3-5 goals. You will take these into the next tactic.  (10 minutes)

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, get your team’s imagination flowing with Sailboat to set a vision to work towards.
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2

Use Sailboat to find out your goals, drivers and barriers

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⏱ Time: 1 hour

🧠 Core Objective: find out what is driving your team, and what may stop you from achieving your vision.

The Sailboat tactic brings together teams and stakeholders to gain a shared understanding of their goals, drivers and barriers. You can find out what is slowing you down, or if the purpose or goals are not quite right. 

💡 Tip: make sure to remind your participants what a S.M.A.R.T goal is (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) and give them an example.

Instructions

  1. Draw a boat to represent the team/project and an anchor to represent the barriers. Draw an island to represent the goals.(3 minute)
  2. Ask each participant to write down the team/project goals on sticky notes as inspired by the last tactic. These are the voted on favourite ‘headlines’ from the previous tactic. (7 minutes)
    Specific: The goal is to increase the employee engagement score and ensure that staff members are happy to come to work. Measurable: The progress can be measured using a standardized employee satisfaction survey. Achievable: It sets a realistic target of a 20% increase rather than an unrealistic 100% improvement. Relevant: Employee engagement and satisfaction are relevant to many aspects of a business, including productivity, retention, and overall workplace culture. Time-bound: The goal aims to achieve the target by the end of the next quarter.
  3. Share and Theme Sort the goals near the island. (10 minutes)

  4. Ask the group to write down the drivers towards the goal on sticky notes. Driver is the the why behind the goal. (5 minutes)
  5. Share and Theme Sort them near the sailboat. (10 minutes)
  6. Write down the barriers (problems) to achieving the goals on sticky notes. (5 minutes)
  7. Share and Theme Sort them near the the anchor. (10 minutes)
  8. Private Vote on the goals to find out what the groups believes are the most important goals. (5 minutes)

  9. Finally, Private Vote the barriers to understand what the most important problem to solve is. (5 minutes)

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, keep your vision and goals close at hand to inform the establishing of your team’s Roles & Responsibilities.
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3

Use Roles and Responsibilities to define your roles

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⏱ Time: 1 hour

🧠 Core Objectives: establish the roles in the team, and what each member does, discusses and decides.

The Roles and Responsibilities tactic helps you to better understand each other’s role, and learn who is responsible for what. Defining clear responsibilities prevents confusion around hierarchy and expertise. It reduces duplicate work and promotes better collaboration. 

💡 Tip: this workshop can be done in smaller team circles or in one large group circle. And remember, if you come to a road block of two different roles thinking they do the same thing, the manager will need to step in a clarify in this moment. 

Instructions

  1. Create a column for each job within the team on a large surface. (2 minutes)
  2. Create three rows labeled Do, Discuss, and Decide. (3 minutes)
    Roles and Responsibilities
  3. Ask each person to complete the three rows for the discipline of the person sitting to their left on sticky notes – to build empathy. If you are virtual create an alphabetical list and assign the person to the left on the list. (10 minutes)

    Do: what are the core responsibilities of their job?

    Discuss: how does their job interact with the wider team?

    Decide: what are they responsible for deciding?

  4. Have each person stick up their notes and share and discuss them with the group. (10 minutes)
  5. For each person’s own job they can add a check mark besides the sticky note if agree, or add an extra sticky notes if something is missing from the definition. (20 minutes)
  6. As a group, Private Vote each job to make sure the group is satisfied with the definitions. (10 minutes)

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, time to take a pause for some fun and learn about your team’s unknown skills with Skills Market.
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4

Use Skills Market to learn about your team members skills

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⏱ Time: 1 hour

🧠 Core Objective: understand what skills each team member has so you can work better together.

The Skills Market tactic enables you to learn about each other’s skills, abilities and ambitions, so you can understand how to help each other grow. Gain a broader picture across teams of the skills and abilities you have access to, and also where people would like to improve. This encourages a culture of learning and improvement, as well as creating connections where collaboration can happen. 

💡 Tip: this is a chance to celebrate your team’s unique hidden talents, and for people to “show-off” their skills and feel good about themselves. Don’t hold back with praise and “wow” moments when learning about your team.

Instructions

  1. Set the scene of a market where everyone is setting up a stall to buy and sell their skills. (2 minutes)
  2. Provide large pieces of paper for each participant to draw their own market stall with sections for their skills, and explain the sections they should include. If you are doing this online make sure to pre set up a shared board, like Miro. (2 minutes)
    Current skills (that allow me to do my job)
    Hidden skills (you might not know I have)
    Desired skills (I want to develop or learn)
  3. Encourage creativity in drawing the market stalls and remind participants that design is not being judged. (1 minute)
  4. Give time for participants to complete each section of their stall. Ask them to include 3-5 points for each section. (15 minutes)
    There is an image of a market stall and in the middle of the stall are three sections for writing: current skills, hidden skills and desired skills. Written in the Current skills section is: -excellent organisation skills -can coordinate communicating with multiple people -punctual and focused Written in the Hidden skills section is: -Handy work around the house -tango dancing -know every character in detail from Harry Potter Written in the Desired skills section is: -Excel spreadsheet shortcuts -filing system updates -in-patient/out-patient organisation
  5. Have participants stick up their skills market on a wall. (2 minutes)
  6. As a group, move around the room together and allow each person to present their market. Point out something impressive about each market.
  7. Encourage others to leave their name next to skills they can help develop or want to ‘buy’ and develop themselves. Each person must write “buy” or “develop” beside their name when writing on another market. (25 minutes)
  8. Optional: Capture actions with Who, What, When. (10 minutes)
    In this image there is a column chart for Who, What and When for each person with sticky notes in each section. The first person is Alina. Alina has a sticky note in the What column that says: Lead a -Excel spreadsheet shortcuts workshop. Alina has a sticky note in the when column that says: January 1. The other person in the example is David. David has a sticky note in the What column that says: Teach Tango dancing class. David has a sticky note in the When column that says: Next Friday.

    ⬇️ In the next tactic, develop an effective strategy to communicate to those involved, taking account their interest and input of the project with a Stakeholders Map.
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🗺️ Overview of the activities
⁉️What next?

Congratulations you have completed your Team Time! Now everyone has a shared understanding of the current goal, created vision, defined responsibilities and now know the random skills you have within your team.

Now you’ve unearthed the ingredients of an effective team, it’s time for an Idea Storm to help you generate and evaluate possible ways to help you achieve even more.

Do you have questions, tips or tricks, etc? Join our Slack community of over 13,000 professionals.

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