Designing Meaningful Team Experiences Part I: 5 Steps to Transform Your Team Building into High-Impact Connection
As a new year kicks off, many leadership and working teams are getting together to prepare for the quarter and year ahead. They’re aligning around vision, strategy, goals. Ideally, they’re agreeing to a clear plan to cascade their dialogue and decisions to their teams.
A lot of really rare and important conversations need to happen this time of year. But they don’t happen by luck. In fact, the level of candor and transparency that these conversations require when they’re done well involve intention, design, and preparation.
I work with leaders and planners to design and facilitate these sessions to ensure they have amazing outcomes, but there are ways to increase their impact without a professional partner.
Building rapport, establishing trust, increasing intimacy, and facilitating communication are essential ingredients for a high performing team, and they are habits that take time and deliberate action to achieve. Take heart! There are 5 simple-but-hard things you can do through high-impact team building experiences that lay the foundation and jump start these habits.
Over the next few posts, I’ll share these 5 things and get into the nuts-and-bolts of putting them into practice, including frameworks and best practices to help you get the best out of your time and your team.
One quick note on language: I use “team building” and “team connection” interchangeably throughout my posts. Both phrases are variations on experiences designed to bring a team together and propel them forward, arm-in-arm, toward a common goal.
So let’s dive in.
5 steps to delivering an impactful team connection experience
Define a clear, simple goal so you can build a strategy and design with confidence. A goal creates the context and meaning for your activity.
Know your team and make sure the design is purposeful and relevant to them and their work. This means understanding the individuals on the team, their relationships with each other, and the dynamics at play deeper in their organizations.
Connect everything to the big picture to convert team building from good fun to relevant work. The experience must anchor in the broader context, tie back to the reality of the team, and help the team solidify learnings and next steps.
Plan team connection experiences for everyone by ensuring the activities are inclusive and inviting. Pick an activity that engages everyone on the team and allows them to offer their strengths and strengthen their weaknesses.
Make team building a habit to maintain, not a one-off to remember. One activity won’t magically build the trust needed to have the candid, impactful conversations about strategy, organizational health, or business challenges. It needs to be part of the team’s routine.
Step 1: Define a clear, simple goal
If you don’t know what you hope to achieve by bringing the team together, you and your team will feel it. And as valuable as abstract experiences can be, “Getting to know each other better” isn’t a goal that justifies the cost of hours of leaders’ time. (Truly, when you start to do the per-hour math of a meeting, the criticality of a robust goal and good design becomes very clear very quickly.)
That said, you don’t need to agonize over a goal either. In fact, you may set a goal at the start and then, as you work through the rest of the 5 Things, you’ll likely refine or even pivot from your initial goal. That’s okay! A goal is your hypothesis about what the team needs most right now. It sets you on a course that lets you learn and adjust in ways that make a difference.
Goal setting frameworks abound, and I prefer to select the framework best fit for purpose. Am I setting a tactical goal focused on process and execution? Make it SMART! Am I setting a strategic goal that reflects enormous complexity? I’ll take 2-3 OKRs please.
When it comes to setting goals for human experiences, I love using the Say, Think, Feel, Do approach. This simple design thinking framework helps you think holistically about the work ahead:
What do you want the team to say about the experience? When they’re talking with each other, their teams, or their partners, how do you want them to describe it?
What do you want the team to think about the experience? As they reflect back on the time spent together, what do you want to cross their mind?
What do you want the team to feel about the experience? Do you want them to feel challenged, energized, inspired, connected?
What do you want the team to do differently as a result of the experience? How do you want them to interact differently with each other? How do you want them to represent the work of their colleagues to their teams?
Your end result might look something like this:
By the end of our team building experience,
I want the team to say that it was time well-spent that exceeded their expectations, and I want them to share with their teams the sense of alignment and commitment they now have with each other.
I want them to think differently about the value each team member offers across functions and I want them to start wondering what perspective other team members would offer.
I want them to feel a deeper sense of connection, respect, and curiosity about each other and a deeper commitment to the shared goal and every leader’s specific goals.
I want them to actively seek out each other’s points of view and co-create goals, plans, and cross-functional teams based on their common goal and growing mutual respect.
Once you have your Say, Think, Feel, Do goal, work backwards, taking a quick look at the team as a whole and individually to figure out what needs to happen to move them from where they are now to where you want them to be. Don’t overthink this. If you think they’re pretty darn close to doing and saying what you want them to, then index more heavily on how they think and feel. If you think they say and think all the right things but need to turn that into heart and action, then focus more on shifting how they feel and act. This simple framework can help set both your trajectory and your design.
In the next installment in the series, I’ll dig deep into who is on your team and how the health of their organizations should impact how you design their time together.
