Understand each other’s skills and passions

Teams work better together when everyone in the team understands everyone else.

The more you know about your colleagues’ skills and passions, the easier it is to collaborate with them; you know what they’re good at, and what motivates them. They know the same about you.

A book called Creating Effective Teams by Susan Wheelan describes 4 stages of team development:

1. Dependency and inclusion

(When teams first get together, no-one really want to disagree with anyone else, people are unwilling to rock the boat. There’s often consensus, but not a lot of trust and deep-rooted agreement)

2. Counterdependency & fight

(As teams mature and get to know eachother, there’s more scope for disagreement; sometimes power struggles get in the way)

3. Trust and structure

(With further maturity comes an atmosphere of trust and respect)

4. Work and productivity

(Eventually, the team has built its culture of trust, and people are better able to collaborate. The team as a whole is more productive)

Teams rarely move smoothly from stage 1 to stage 4. They tend to switch from one to another, particularly when the team itself changes (for example, when someone leaves and is replaced by a newcomer).

The goal, though, is to move towards stages 3 and 4 and remain there, if possible.

There are several activities you can do to help your team understand each other’s skills and passions, and move towards stages 3 and 4 of team development.

Here’s a few we’ve used before.

Team onion

(Adapted from an idea by Emily Webber)

A team onion is a visual map of a team’s stakeholders. It helps a team see their various stakeholders, and understand better how to interact with them all. Some stakeholders need to be kept closer, and know more; others are more distant, and need higher-level information, less often.

To create one, you must gather the whole team together physically or virtually, for approx 2 hours of facilitated discussion. We usually encourage teams to use a visual tool like Miro for the mapping process.

User manual of me

(Adapted from an idea by Cassie Robinson)

User manual of me is another facilitated exercise that unearths and exposes things that team members aren’t always confident to reveal to one another.

It’s a powerful way of understanding individual circumstances, habits and preferences. The whole team takes part, and everyone is equally empowered to be as open as they can about their approach to work.

At the end of the session, every team member has created a simple “manual” about themselves that other team members can refer to.

This exercise is especially good for newly formed teams getting to know each other for the first time, but it can also be useful for well established teams too.

Understanding roles and responsibilities

(content here)

Understanding team dynamics

(content here)