Chapter 9. Team Dynamics Workshop
As a result of Lydia’s hard work, Nathan’s team was transformed from a bunch of individuals to a high-performance team. So Nathan decided to put together a team workshop to enable future teams at Autonomous Securities, LLC to quickly learn all these valuable lessons.
Preparation
This book contains all the materials needed to facilitate and run the workshop, with the exception of the following:
• Supplies for the Bridge exercise are inexpensive and can be purchased at a drugstore or grocery store.
• Certain exercises (as described next) require paper, pens, flip charts, whiteboards, index cards, and so on, which most companies have available, but the facilitator needs to be prepared with these supplies.
Workshop Instructions
The Agile Team Dynamics workshop is a powerful way to begin the process of coaching a team toward productivity optimization. The workshop provides a way for team members to learn new skills while learning about each other. Therefore, to get the most value from the time spent participating in the workshop, it’s best when a project team attends the workshop together.
The workshop instructions are split into three parts:
• Post-Workshop
Pre-Workshop
A day or two prior to the workshop, all participants should complete the DISC assessment and bring their results to the workshop. Many of the workshop exercises and discussions leverage the DISC profile of the participants. From a logistics standpoint, getting all participants to complete the DISC assessment at least one day before the workshop may be the most challenging task of the entire workshop! Participants who show up on the day of the workshop without a completed DISC can disrupt the experience for everyone else, so the facilitator is encouraged to pester everyone with reminders in the days leading up to the workshop.
Do the following:
1. Select a date, location, and times for the workshop. Choose a date when all members of a team are available to attend together. When selecting a room for the workshop, be mindful that the Bridge exercise requires that the participants be split into groups of 4–6 people, and each group needs a space with two desks or tables separated by three feet. This exercise may not work in a typical conference room, and it may not work in classrooms where the furniture can’t be moved. If you can’t find a room that works, you may be able to bring in small rolling file cabinets or other similar pieces of furniture that can serve as the surfaces required for building the bridge. All the other workshop exercises can work in any type of room.
2. Have every participant take a DISC assessment prior to the workshop and bring their reports to the workshop. The free DISC contained in this book will suffice for all the exercises other than the BalderDISC exercise found in Chapter 13, “BalderDISC.” The BalderDISC exercise requires all participants to take a DISC assessment from a provider that provides a detailed DISC report and a wheel (as opposed to a simple DISC graph). It is therefore important that you plan this well in advance.
3. Make plans for lunch. The Moon exercise is planned to be run during lunchtime, and there is no additional time budgeted for leaving to get food. Ask participants to bring a bag lunch or plan to have lunch brought in during the midpoint of the workshop.
4. Prepare the following materials that will be required during the workshop exercises:
The Bridge
• Drinking straws (three boxes/bags per group)
• Scotch tape (two rolls per group)
• Elastic bands (three small bags or one large bag per group)
• Paper clips (four boxes per group)
• There are several handouts for this exercise in Chapter 12, “Moon Survival.” It’s important that participants not look ahead when participating in this exercise. You may choose to bookmark specified pages and instruct the participants not to look ahead, or you may find it easier to copy those pages and distribute them as they are needed during the exercise.
Origami
• There is an origami instruction sheet in Chapter 10, “Communication Origami.” Only half the participants will use this instruction sheet. As with Moon Survival, you may choose to copy the instruction sheet ahead of time and hand it out to select participants at the appropriate time. For this exercise you also need a blank sheet of 8½ × 11-inch paper for the other half of the participants.
The Workshop
The workshop lasts approximately eight and a half hours when conducted in the following format. The instructions for all workshop exercises are included in this book. The starting/ending times for each segment can be adjusted if necessary. The times shown in Table 9.1 enable you to run the workshop between 8:30 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. with an exercise during lunch.
Table 9.1 Workshop Times and Activities
