Insights
Unlock Team Potential with Magical LEGO Sessions: Integrating Psychometrics for Better Collaboration
Understanding these traits helps in appreciating the diversity within any team. Each person's unique blend of abilities and values can create a more cohesive and effective group dynamic. During our LEGO Serious Play sessions, we often see that the key takeaway for participants is how these varied strengths build uniquely within the team, fostering a deeper understanding of each other.
The Power of a Spotter in Team Meetings
By appointing a “spotter” in your team meetings—someone whose sole responsibility is to observe body language and verbal cues—you can ensure that these often-overlooked signals are captured and addressed in real-time. This role can help unearth key insights and balance the extrovert/introvert equation, ensuring everyone's perspectives are considered.i
Harnessing the Power of Competition in Team Building
In every team, competition inevitably emerges. Individuals often compete for the best idea, attention, or simply to satisfy their ego. This competitive spirit can be harnessed positively, transforming it into a driving force for innovation and problem-solving. The key lies in how we frame competition within the team dynamic.
The Human Communication System in Teams
Using this as a mental model makes it easy to see why and how communication breakdowns happen, especially in teams.
For this post, I'll dig specifically into the system itself, applying the 5 stages of a communication system to people, and then extract how this impacts people and teams in various scenarios. Once you see how the system is easily applied, you'll be able to deconstruct communication challenges in a new and simpler way.
Hierarchy of Communication Challenges: Unveiling the Layers
Effective communication is often cited as the cornerstone of successful organizations. However, communication issues are typically symptoms of deeper, underlying challenges. By understanding these layers hierarchically, companies can pinpoint where true communication challenges lie and address them more effectively. Let's explore this hierarchy and uncover the root causes of communication breakdowns.
An Easy Team Building Question to Boost Connection
Here is why I think its such a powerful question:
1. Its safe: We don't know much as kids, so whatever we wanted to be was guided by the small world we understood.
2. It's fun: This brings us back to a simpler time, and when we use LEGO's, this adds to the playful nature of the question, and a playful time in our lives.
3. It's somewhat revealing: Not too deep, but it can show passions that may still be alive today
4. It allows us to see others with more depth and dimension.
Discover Your Team’s Passions Through Team Building
Dale Carnegie said "To be interesting, be interested. People get animated when they get to talk about their passions. When done correctly in groups, this adds to the depth and dimension in which people see each other. When we know people better, we share more easily, are more vulnerable, more forgiving, and more open. The key is to make this feel natural and not forced.
Facilitated Team Building is Better than Free Range Team Building
Think of the variety of team building events you’ve done- Most of them are free range. Happy hour, games, and even volunteering can be energizing and enjoyable, yet the interactions between people aren’t designed to connect. You are hoping for randomized collisions to help people connect. Facilitated events creates collisions and harnesses them to create connection with intent.
Solving for Conflict in Teams
I have found that through the many workshops I have done, that MOST of the time, when everyone gets a chance to share their wants and needs, it's not all that hard to build out win-win scenarios. Everyone needs to slow down, define the problem clearly, and flush out all perspectives. Once the nuance of the situation is unearthed, it's simple to see the higher level solution.
Building Empathy in Teams With Personal Stories
Steve from accounting becomes Steve the guy who played baseball in the Little League World Series. Your team has a ton of stories like this and when shared, they will add depth and dimension to the relationships in your team. When we can hear, see, and understand the depth and dimension behind our teammates histories, we gain appreciation for them as a person. We understand they are more than the role they fill.
Navigating Territorial Expertise in Teams
Imagine a department is represented by physical territory. When someone represents a department, they are a representing the whole territory. Basic expectations, norms, communication modalities and even how the mission, vision, and values show up can be vastly different in each territory. As organizations get larger, so can the variance between these territories.
Play Can Connect and Promote Team Performance
Yet the best teams, the most engaged, prosocial, and connected, use play.
Play connects us, play opens up our neural pathways, play diminishes group norms, play brings our true self to the table.