Alignment, positive interaction and proactive … asking others for help

[Anonymous]

I ran this exercise recently with a team and during the feedback it was agreed this was the most powerful part of the 2-day program.

The purpose of the exercise was for team members to better understand each other’s activities and priorities, to highlight that we all need help from others, but we are also required to help others, and finally to start to build some alignment in a team that was historically working in silos.

Here are the steps:

– each team member will individually look at their own job description/annual objectives, and identify minimum 3 and maximum 5 priorities that are important but that this person cannot achieve alone; these priorities are written in column 1 on a horizontal flip chart sheet
– for each of these priorities, the owner indicates from who help is needed, by writing the name of one or more people in the same room in column 2
– in column 3, the owner writes what specifically is needed from each person in column 2 (need to avoid generic terms like “full support” …!)
– after about 15 minutes, team members takes turns to explain their priorities
– after the explanation, the people who have their name in column 2 take a post-it note, write their name on it, and write their level of commitment … this level of commitment can be “100% no problem”, or “yes but …” or “we need to discuss about this”
– after this, anyone else in the room, even if their name is not in column 2, can add a post-it on a particular topic if they would like to help, have some ideas, or would like to be consulted
– each owner takes away their own priority sheet, with the different post-its summarizing the commitments from team members

The header of the columns is (1) to reach my objective … (2) I need the help from … (3) under the form of …

[Author]

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