Exercise for building trust in teams

EMPATHY WALK

A lower level of trust in a team might come forth from the fact that the team members do not really know each other well. For whatever reason (quite often time pressure to deliver results) they do not spend sufficient time to get to know the person behind their colleague better. To start building trust in the team, I have found this exercise very powerful.

This exercise is in fact a mixture of the ‘Life Changing Experience’ TCI Masterclass exercise and the practice that was developed by MIT’s Ed Schein who shaped the field of organizational culture, learning and leadership over the past 50 years.

PURPOSE

– To develop empathy for someone either very different from you, or with who you have an edgy relationship or who you hardly know
– To develop your (listening) skills in establishing a relationship across a (significant) boundary
– To enhance the level of trust within a team

PROCEDURE

1. Ask the team members to reflect on the question who in the team would be interesting to get to know better, either because this person is very different from you, or because who you have an edgy relationship with this person or because it is someone you hardly know. Let the team decide on the couples to be made.

2. Ask the couples to go out for a walk. They get 45 minutes to ask each other the following questions:
o What was it like to grow up?
o What did you learn in school that is still with you today?
o What is a life-changing experience (other than birth of children) for you?
3. Ask the team members to try to get into their partner’s world enough, during those 45 minutes, to get a feel for what it would be like to be in that person’s world. There are no rules or guidelines. Be creative. The idea here is to get away from their computer/phones and the meeting room, go out into the world, and practice empathy, relationship building, and deep listening with that person.**
4. When the couples are back, ask each team member to share the story of their partner with the rest of the team.

**OPTION
Before stepping into this exercise, the coach could also first introduce the ‘Iceberg of Communication’ (see Google) and then ask the team members to formulate additional clarifying questions during the empathy walk to get a better understanding of what is there at the underlying levels of their partner’s iceberg.