How to Lead & Grow Better Teams. A Team Exercise

How to effectively lead teams? 

Leif Babin and Jocko Willink, former Navy SEALs and now New York Times best-selling authors, observed that a leader's behavior directly impacts a team's performance. In a Business Insider video, they highlighted an exercise where SEAL candidates were grouped by height into boat crews. The most senior-ranking sailor became the boat crew leader, responsible for executing the lead instructor’s orders during grueling races involving running and paddling.
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After several rounds, one team consistently came in first. The instructors then switched the leaders of the best and worst teams. Remarkably, under new leadership, the previously great team did well but not as well as before, while the formerly terrible team placed first. This exercise demonstrates how effective leadership can turn underperforming teams into successful ones and vice versa.

Share your screw-ups if you want to lead effective teams 

Google's Project Aristotle studied over 180 teams for two years and identified psychological safety as the most crucial element for high-performing teams. Psychological safety means that people feel safe to share their work, admit mistakes, give and receive feedback, and participate in tough conversations. This is where vulnerability plays a key role.

Being openly vulnerable at work can feel counterintuitive. We're taught not to share our shortcomings or hesitations, seeing vulnerability as a sign of weakness. However, sharing faults can foster trust and cohesion within teams. Jeff Polzer, a Harvard professor of organizational behavior, discovered "vulnerability loops," which are simple interactions that open doors to cooperation and trust.

What are vulnerability loops?

Vulnerability loops involve:

1. One person communicates a message of vulnerability.
2. Another person responds with empathy.
3. The initial person acknowledges this response.

This pattern builds trust and rapport. For example, the CEO of Uber, in his parting memo from Expedia, admitted to feeling scared but encouraged others to embrace change and growth. Such admissions can create a culture where team members feel safe to be open and honest.

To facilitate these elements, utilizing a comprehensive employee communications app like CentricMinds can be invaluable. CentricMinds offers features like instant team messaging, real-time chat, and collaborative content sharing, which are crucial for maintaining clarity, ensuring dependability, and recognizing team contributions.

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Design a High-Trust Team Culture

Consider the following elements in your team playbook:

• Dependability: Team members can rely on each other. This means meeting deadlines, being present for meetings, and following through on commitments. With CentricMinds, teams can use task management features to track responsibilities and ensure everyone is accountable.
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• Structure and Clarity: Everyone’s role and expectations are clear. When roles are well-defined, teams can work more efficiently. CentricMinds can help with creating clear channels for different projects and roles, making sure everyone knows what is expected of them.
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• Meaning: Recognition and positive feedback fuel the team. When team members feel that their work has meaning and is recognized, they are more motivated. CentricMinds' feedback tools and recognition features can help in acknowledging efforts and achievements regularly.
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• Impact: Team members see how their work contributes to organizational goals. Regular updates and transparent communication about how individual contributions align with the company's mission can enhance the sense of impact. CentricMinds can provide a platform for these updates and ensure everyone is aligned with the bigger picture.

To further support the integration of AI into the workplace, it’s essential to build trust not only among team members but also between teams and AI systems. As AI brings many benefits, it also introduces changes that people may resist. Building trust in AI involves transparent communication about its role and capabilities and ensuring that team members understand how AI can support and enhance their work.

Inclusion and the Alternative Workforce

Diversity and inclusion lead to innovation and better decision-making. Avoid groupthink by encouraging all team members to share their ideas and perspectives. Facilitating seamless communication among remote and in-house members is crucial for promoting inclusivity.

The modern workforce is multifaceted, comprising freelancers, contractors, remote staff, and increasingly, AI agents. By 2029, freelance workers will represent more than 50% of the US working population. Leading such a diverse workforce requires flexibility and the ability to quickly acclimatize and integrate new team members, including AI agents.

Integrating AI agents into teams involves ensuring that human team members understand how AI can support and enhance their work. This requires fostering a culture of trust and transparency around AI use, addressing any concerns, and highlighting the benefits of AI integration. By doing so, all team members—whether human or AI—can collaborate effectively, ensuring everyone feels included and valued.

How to Take a Random Group of People and Turn them into a Team

To design a high-trust team culture, you'll need to take an active role in working with a group. How do you get things off to a good start, ensure everyone in your team participates, and is given equal turns in contributing? It's called "equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking." It's a Harvard thing. It consistently shows up in teams that work well together.

What it means is that everyone in the group or team gets the same proportion of time to talk. If only a few individuals dominate the conversation, then the combined intelligence of the team declines. During the facilitation of the exercise, it's best to get people to write their answers on sticky notes so that everybody can take a turn.

Intention of the Team Exercise

This exercise has been designed to assist leaders and teams in organizations in challenging the current state and imagining a better future state for how they work. Use the exercises to adopt new team norms, introduce practices, and rituals for how you can work more effectively. We hope it helps all team members begin conversations, gain clarity, and produce results.

An Exercise Designed to Work Through with Your Team

By working through each of the seven elements, you'll collectively map the purpose, objectives, metrics, values, behavioral standards, influence, inclusion, rituals, and symbols that help teams function.

You can use this for new teams or teams that may be struggling and could do with some improvement. Use it to guide better choices, solve conflicts, lift, or add more meaning to the workday. If the lifespan of the team is brief, then you can select which aspects will bring the most value and clarity to your team.

The design exercise is for every team member to participate actively with help from a facilitator. The exercise helps everyone map out their desired future state and goals. It makes it visible for everyone and transforms abstract team concepts into visible concrete ones. The outputs of the exercise are the guide rails that will help prevent team members from falling off the edge when there are conflicts, decisions, or problems. It's designed to help you foster team performance.

"Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future." - Robert L. Peters, designer and author.

Designing a team is an iterative process, and together with your team, you'll want to prototype behaviors and rituals that reflect your team's values and objectives. Together you can examine if it's working for you, collect feedback, and fine-tune as you go.

You’ll need all the standard items for this exercise: laptop, try miro or canva to workshop it, sticky notes, and markers.

Team Exercise

Instructions:

Explain the Team Exercise: Explain its purpose and how it will help the team navigate challenges and align on goals and values. The Team Exercise is a collaborative tool designed to help teams align on common goals, values, and processes. It provides a structured way to discuss and document the team's purpose, values, and objectives.
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Card 1: Team Purpose‍

Define the team's purpose, aligned with the organization’s mission and values. Use sticky notes or Miro to capture responses and create a concise purpose statement.

Questions:

1. What do we stand for?
2. Why are we doing this as a team?
3. What do we want in the future as a team?
4. Where is our team headed?

This exercise helps connect the team's daily activities with the larger organizational goals, ensuring that everyone understands how their work contributes to the overall mission.

‍Card 2: Team Values‍

Align team values with organizational values. Use dot voting to narrow down the most important values.

Questions:

1. What do we value here?
2. What values will help us achieve our purpose?
3. What is a must? What don't we compromise?
4. Why is this important?
5. Do we live by these values now?
6. What do we want as a team?
7. What do those values look like daily?
8. What do they look like if there is a problem?
9. What do they look like when we are working with remote team members or new team members?
10. Team values might include things like trust, respect, innovation, and collaboration. Defining these values helps create a shared understanding of what is important to your teams.

Card 3: Goals

‍Clearly define team goals. Prioritize specific, measurable, and realistic goals.

Questions:

1. What are the goals of our team?
2. What are we expected to do as a team?
3. What outputs are we expected to achieve as a team?

Goals should be aligned with the team's purpose and values. They should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Individual Goals: Map individual goals and see how they align with the team's goals.

Questions:

1. What are your personal aspirations within this team?
2. How do your individual goals align with our team’s objectives?
3. What skills do you want to develop while working with this team?
4. What do you hope to achieve professionally in the next 6 months?
5. How can the team support you in reaching your personal goals?
6. What motivates you the most in your work?
7. Are there any specific projects or tasks you are particularly interested in?
8. How do you see your role evolving within the team?
9. What challenges do you anticipate in achieving your individual goals?
10. How can your individual contributions make a difference to the team's success?

Card 4: Measuring Goals‍

Questions:

1. How will we measure success as a team? (e.g., time, customer satisfaction scores, meeting targets, troubleshooting problems, communication, collaboration, efficiency, innovation, less conflict)
2. How can we share results early and often as a team?
3. What are the elements we need in our team so we can achieve results?
4. How do we hold each other accountable? What does it look like for our team?
5. How can we observe, track, and use the measures?

Measuring goals involves setting key performance indicators (KPIs) or (OKR's) that align with the team's objectives. CentricMinds can be used to track these KPIs and provide real-time updates on progress using the performance planning development and tasks tools.

Card 5: Team Behavior

Questions:

1. What behaviors in our team do we value?
2. What don't we value? (e.g., Frustration, Hidden agendas, Micromanagement, Surprises)
3. What behaviors should we start or stop?
4. What are the behaviors that support our goals?
5. What do straight talk and hard conversations look like to us?
6. How do we make decisions now, and what are the behaviors?
7. What happens if we make mistakes?
8. What do team behaviors look like on a good day?
9. What do they look like on a bad day?
10. What are the behaviors if we are stuck?
11. What behaviors suck?
12. What is something I would like people in the team to STOP doing?
13. What would I like them to CONTINUE doing?
14. What negative consequences will we see if we don't change it?
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Inclusive Questions:

1. How do we welcome new people into the team?
2. What was your first day with the team like? Why and what would you change?
3. How can we be more inclusive? What do those behaviors look like?
4. How can we support the development of each other?
5. What would you like to see more of from team members?
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Deep-Dive Culture Questions:

Imagine you are new in the team. Now ask these questions of a team member:

1. So, what should I do to get ahead here?
2. What shouldn't I do?
3. What makes people successful here?
4. What made you successful?

Discussing team behaviours helps create a positive team culture. It involves identifying both positive behaviors to encourage and negative behaviors to avoid.

Card 6 Rituals

Create regular practices that support team values and goals. Examples include stand-up meetings, onboarding rituals, and feedback sessions.

Questions:

1. What rituals do we have now?
2. What new rituals would we like to try?
3. How often do we want to include rituals?
4. How do we reward and recognize team members?
5. Can we include recognition rituals for good work?

Rituals help reinforce the team's values and create a sense of belonging. CentricMinds employee experience app will facilitate these rituals through scheduled reminders, recognition, feedback making it easier for teams to stay consistent and engaged.

Card 7 Signals

Use physical, digital, and behavioral symbols to reinforce the team’s purpose and values.

Questions:

1. What symbols will remind us of our purpose?
2. What physical symbols can we use?
3. What digital symbols can we use?
4. What behavioural symbols can we use?
5. How can we use these signals to foster trust in AI systems within our team?

Signals help to remind team members of their goals and values. They can be as simple as posters on the wall, digital reminders in your employee experience app that CentricMinds offers, or specific phrases used in meetings.

CentricMinds can help reinforce these signals through customizable notifications, team recognition posts, and a shared platform for celebrating achievements. Additionally, transparent communication about the use and benefits of AI can help build trust and ease the transition to incorporating AI into daily workflows.

Wrapping Up

Building a strong team takes effort, but it's worth it. The Team Exercise helps align your goals, values, and behaviors, fostering a culture of trust and openness.

As AI becomes part of our workflows, it's vital to build trust within the team and with AI systems. Clear communication about AI's role can ease this transition.

Tools like CentricMinds support this journey with features like team messaging, real-time chat, and collaborative content sharing.

So, gather your team, use the Team Exercise, and start building a future of collaboration and continuous improvement. Here’s to your team’s success!