Purpose: To combine a team-building exercise with a lesson in diversity by having teams share information about themselves with others in the group.

 Time Required: 15 to 25 minutes.

 Size of Group: Unlimited, but participants should work in small groups of four to six.

 Materials Required: A sheet of questions, prepared in advance by the trainer; Post-It Notes; flipchart.

 The Exercise in Action: Susan Partee, a training assistant with O’Reilly Automotive, Inc., Springfield, MO, creates a list of questions that are interesting, but not embarrassing, and has at least as many questions as there are members on the largest team.

Partee then breaks the class into small groups of four to six participants and hands out a copy of the list to each participant, asking them to cross off those questions that exceed the number of group members. (For example, a team of six would answer only the first six questions.) Flipchart pages, each bearing one question, are posted on the wall for later use.

Partee instructs participants to label question number one with the name of the person directly to their left, number two with the next person, and so on around the table until each question has a member’s name beside it. The result: Each person’s name should appear beside a given question on only one other person’s sheet.

Next she gives participants Post-It Notes and instructs them to ask the person whose name appears next to each question on their sheets for the corresponding answer. Each answer is recorded (along with the respondent’s name) on a Post-It Note and placed on the appropriate flipchart page.

When everyone is finished, Partee reads as many of the answers as time allows. In the discussion that follows, Partee asks participants what they have learned about their teammates that might contribute to the success of their group.