Modern companies understand that embracing diversity and inclusion can significantly increase the effectiveness of their team. Diversity in all its forms leads to more innovative products, solutions, ways of working and ultimately, increased company performance (see McKinsey’s paper on why diversity matters).

Being able to create inclusive teams is so important to me that a while ago I wrote a post on why building teams was so important. In it I highlighted that teams benefit from having an explicit focus on building empathy and team cohesion. I outlined a few basic steps on what you should be thinking about, but I didn’t delve into what activities or practices you could use to do so.

This post will outline my three; go to activities for helping teams deliberately build empathy for one another, improving their ability to create a more inclusive team.

When attempting to build a team with high levels of cohesion, I typically focus on two key activities.

1. Building empathy for one another
2. Codify that empathy into an explicit operating agreement of how the team will work with each other

In many teams empathy building is left to develop through team building events. Session where you do things together and hopefully team cohesion will increase. Quite often after the session nothing really changes and everything goes back to how it was before the session.

It is not the norm, to use systematic ways of building empathy within teams. This post will focus purely on three activities that can help you build empathy in a systematic way.

For most teams I work with one of three activities is almost always appropriate. Depending on the context of a team, I may sometimes go outside of these three activities, but for 90% of teams one of these three activities will work wonders:

1. Moving Motivators
2. Game vs Process
3. The best team you ever worked on

The choice of which activity to use, is normally based on the current dynamics of the team members. Moving Motivators is the most structured approach but can feel intrusive and artificial if a team doesn’t feel safe in sharing. On the other hand, “The best team you ever worked on” is the least structured approach and although it is less intrusive it may lead to less insightful outcomes.

In all cases though teams should be able to build empathy for each other, so the most important thing is to pick an approach where everyone in the team will feel safe in being their genuine selves.

Moving Motivators

Moving Motivators is a management 3.0 activity created by Jurgen Appelo. This activity provides a well structure approach to exposing the inner drivers of your different team member.

Individuals are asked to prioritise a set of 10 intrinsic desires based on what is most important to them. By sharing back and visualising these different desires as a group, teams can begin to understand what is common (or not) about what drives the individuals within the teams.

At its best, this approach enables a team to define an operating structure that helps each individual achieve their personal drivers while working as a team.

At worst it provides a platform for teams to empathise with each other and then decide on compromises that will give the team the best balance in achieving the competing drivers of the team.

Ultimately this leads teams to have a better understanding of each other and results in a more effective working environment.

The other huge benefit of moving motivators is in using the approach to enabling team members to express whether they feel that the current environment is achieving their various drivers. Rather than waiting to be surprised when someone has had enough and outright quits, you can use these insights to make immediate adjustments to your team to address any shortcomings in how the team works.

Because not all the teams are co-located I’ve also made a google drawing version of moving motivators for use with distributed teams.

Game vs Process

Game vs Process is an activity Jeff Patton uses during one of his Passionate Product Owner course. This activity is a slightly structured approach which is less intrusive than moving motivators.

This makes it perfect for teams that don’t feel safe enough to share their innermost feelings but would still benefit from a little structure to encourage them to share what matters to them.

This activity starts with a team listing all the terms that come to mind in relation to games followed by a period of listing all the terms that come to mind in relation to processes.

Team members then express their views about which of the various terms that have been listed come to mind when they thinking about the best team they’ve ever worked on.

For most teams, the factors they select will span both games and process, but the exact mix will be different depending on the individuals within that team.

Having an appreciation for what the factors are that a team wishes to retain/establish, enables them to decide on an operating pattern that achieves these characteristics.

The best team you ever work on

This approach is the most unstructured of the three activities and also the least intrusive.

This is kicked off as a simple unstructured conversation about what was the best team each individual ever worked on.

Each team member is given the opportunity to talk about what team this was and what it was about that team that made it so great. By providing the platform for each person on the team to express the dynamics of the team they enjoyed the most, the team is able to build a great appreciation for how each team member likes to operate.

After sharing their stories, the team members are then challenged to define an operating agreement that will ensure the current team will become the best team they have ever worked on.

After having run one of these sessions, it is important to codify an operating agreement into a visible artefact that the team can use to remind themselves of how they have agreed to operate.

For the teams I work with I encourage them to do this via a social contract and to put this somewhere that allows team members to reference it and call out when things are happening that are not consistent with their agreed operating rules.

This enables the social contract to be reinforced until it becomes an inherent part of how the team works.

Once this happens, it is often a great opportunity to run one of these sessions again to create a new social contract (you can discard the old statements because they are now habit) around new items that will make the team even better.

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