Create a highly innovative team
Team Check-up
The Aim
The purpose of the Team Check-up is to assess how well your team is working together based on 10 factors that research suggest are imperative to maintaining a healthy team. This workshop takes 60-90 minutes, depending on the size of your team.
Resources
- Facilitator & scribe
- Team Check-up Factor Descriptions
- Spreadsheet (if virtual)
- Post-it notes & Flip chart (if in-person)
Method
- Split team into groups of between 3 and 7 people
- Set the stage. Establish voting criteria:
- At the start of the meeting, reiterate the purpose of the Team Check-up, to assess how well your team is working together. Reassure your team that there are no right or wrong answers, and everyone’s opinion is equal.
- Each person will be asked to vote how well they think the team is doing against attributes with a “thumbs up” (green), “thumbs sideways (yellow), or “thumbs down” (red). How each team member thinks about red, yellow and green will be unique to them. Encourage them to use their intuition and don’t worry about establishing standardised criteria for each colour – that only distracts from the discussion.
- Vote and capture feedback for each attribute
- As a facilitator, read the attribute and the description, focusing on one attribute at a time.
- Ask the groups to reflect on how they will vote on each attribute. It’s best to hold off on voting until everyone is ready to avoid groupthink and bias.
- Everyone in each group must vote at the same time. Whether in virtual breakout rooms, or in-person, do a countdown before voting with thumbs.
- Once voted and while thoughts are fresh, ask each group to take 1-2 minutes to capture their thoughts or feedback. Try to encourage each group to capture “why” they voted the way they did and whatever comes top of mind. This helps to capture feedback as they go.
- Prompt questions:
- Why did you vote the way you did for this attribute?
- What feedback on this attribute are you curious about or would like to learn more?
- Why do you think others voted this way?
- Once some thoughts are captured, the group should then move on to the next attribute. They should plan on spending 5 minutes on each attribute.
- Prompt questions:
- Once all groups have completed their voting for each attribute, come back together as a whole team and vote on the top few attributes to work on further in the coming months.
- Start by reviewing all the votes as a team, and asking each group to share back their reflections
- After reviewing all the votes from each group, the team should align on 1-3 areas that they would like to actively work on and improve. These could be obvious areas that had red or yellow scores, or they could be areas that the team all assumed were green, but have some red votes.
- For each area, as a team, identify the next sensible action to improve – what’s the smallest step you can take?” Be sure to note it on your flipchart, spreadsheet or other document.
The Outcome
- A good idea about the current temperature of the team
- 1-3 areas that you know you want to tackle, to move towards green on each of the factors
- Increased team bonding because you’ve just spent 90-minutes deliberately connecting and checking in ❤️
Other ways of creating a highly innovative team
Forge an exceptionally innovative team by harnessing collective intelligence through shifting. Elevate success rates with pre-mortems, reclaim time via zombie campaigns, validate ideas through experiments, and uncover lucrative business prospects, fostering a culture of continuous and transformative growth.
