The above photo is the result of a team building activity that one of my people led for our team this past week. As previously discussed in some of my previous posts, making time for team development is important and easy to do.

I make a point to incorporate time each week for team development because it helps strengthen the relationship between the members of our team and it helps to increase our collective knowledge/mutual understanding of ideas. We rotate who runs the team development session each week.

This week one of my people introduced our weekly discussion as an activity. She asked all of us to draw a pig on a piece of paper. Once we all finished, she shared some insights about how the details fo the drawing share insights about each of us. Where the pig was drawn on the paper, the direction the pig was facing, how may legs it had, the size of its ear, etc…

After she shared the insights (which can be viewed here), we shared our drawings with the group and discussed whether or not we agreed with what our drawings said about us.

Everyone didn’t necessary agree with everything the insight sheet said about them, but I felt that the activity added value to our team for a several reasons:

The activity got each of talking and sharing thoughts about how members of the team think .

. And this, in turn, helps us to build and maintain mutual understanding and empathy within our team.

within our team. It gave one of my people (the activity leader) the opportunity to be put out in front of everyone on the team and be accepted/appreciated by the team for what she shared with all of us.

In total the activity and discussion took 30 minutes, that’s 1.25% of our working hours (assuming you work 40 hours a week). Team development doesn’t have to be difficult and it doesn’t have to take a long time.

How much are trust, psychological safety, and team cohesion worth to you?

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