Management 3.0 Mindset: III – Energizing and Unleashing Team Potential
By Diane Brady, CSM, PMP, PMI-ACP
This is the third article in the series. Read Part I and Part II.
As promised, I will spend time talking about energizing the team and unleashing potential by using several Management 3.0 practices interactive games. These games are fun and engaging for the teams, yet bring out good performance and team behavior, and promote improvement practices. As a project manager, it has definitely been rewarding to work with teams this way.
Can You Map Your Teammates?
In the early stages of forming a team it is a good idea to help the team get comfortable with each other. I do this by conducted a Personal Maps session. This can be done when the team members really don’t know much about each other. I draw the diagram below on a whiteboard and enter “you” in the middle circle. I then enter Home, Education, Work, Hobbies, Family, Friends, Values, Goals in the circle just outside of the “you” circle. I then ask them to create the same diagram on blank paper with their name in the middle, pick a partner and trade papers. (They can add as many circles as they need.) In the next five minutes they ask each other questions in order to complete the blank circles attached on the outer sides. After five minutes they return the paper to the owner, pick another partner and start again. They continue this until they have all met with each other. They learn a lot about their team members!
I have also done this with teams that have been working together, but don’t seem to relate to each other. In this case, I might have them draw the circle, put their name in the middle and add the next outer circle (Home, Education, Work, Hobbies, Family, Friends, Values) attached to the name. I then ask them to pass the drawing to the right and ask that person to fill in as many items as they can about the person whose name is in the middle. After five minutes they pass to the next person until the drawing has made it back to the original party. The original party is then asked to talk about the surprises and/or any inaccuracies. It is a lot of fun, they learn things about each other that they have in common and they have new things to bond over. I suggest they may want to hang up their maps in their desk area.
Do You Know What Motivates Your Teammates?
We are all different, so what I think motivates individual people may be way off. I like to increase the odds a bit, and I do this with Moving Motivators. These cards are downloadable from the Management 3.0 site. I encourage you to try this and get creative in the way you use them with the team and even your co-workers. I use this early in a project, even at a project kick-off, just to understand what is important and what motivates people, sometimes to helping to form team values. I have also used them in retrospectives when some sort of change has been introduced and I want to see how this changed their motivation.
I print out the cards for each team member, and then distribute them. I usually open the session by stating that we are all uniquely wired and motivated in different ways. Understanding these differences can help us work better together as well as see where we share similarities. I ask them to think about what motivates them and put the cards in the order left to right, top to bottom, in that order (see example below).
I make sure I have something with their name on it that I can place in the picture I take after they finish. Typically I will compile the data in an Excel document and send it out to the team. They can use this to motivate each other!
Moving Motivator Cards
TIP: I keep a copy as this information is gold when it comes time to celebrate or reward for reaching a team or project goal!
Champfrogs Checklist
As mentioned early, Moving Motivators can be used when there is a change in the environment. You can use the Champfrogs Checklist questions to introduce discussion about changes both inward (us) and outward (them). The Champfrogs Checklist has the same motivators as shown above for Moving Motivator cards but the questions help the team reflect on different views. I will print out the table below along with the picture from the Moving Motivators cards for each team member or do the above exercise first, and then set the stage by talking about the potential change. I will point out the questions are designed to broaden their thinking about change. I might ask, “Given this change how does this affect the order of your Motivator Cards?” This is super powerful data to use for stakeholder discussions about how external changes affect the motivation of the team.
You can be creative and use the Champfrogs checklist and the Moving Motivator cards to get people to talk about why change is happening, how they feel about it, and to understand the effect it might have on the team’s attitude toward work and their environment.
Kudos Anyone?
As we proceed with project work we are focused on getting the work done and finishing our deliverables. One of the ways I remember to celebrate the wins and the great things people do is to create a Kudo Box and print out Kudo Cards. These cards, which you can download from the Management 3.0 site, are colorful and can dress up a corner in the shared kitchen or a wall area close to the team.
I explain the purpose of the Kudo Box and encourage others to take time to acknowledge others and place the cards in the box. I get things started by picking a few cards (thank you, congratulations, done well, etc.) and write up some things team members have done worth acknowledging. I put time on my calendar to regularly think about things to add to the Kudo Box. I often write two cards, one for the Kudo Box and one to put up in the person’s desk area.
Kudo Cards
This is a great way to appreciate the effort people put in and the personal touch is usually appreciated (people know you are super busy, so the time to do this means something). These colorful cards stand out and get noticed. You know things are going well when people stop putting them in the Kudo Box and just give them to each other!
Celebration Grids
The Celebration Grid is one of my favorites. This exercise is designed to bring out things the team has done well, learning along the way, and to examine things that didn’t go so well. Things that did not go well should be celebrated if the team learned because they learned and can improve from the experience. It specifically encourages continued experimentation in order to continue learning. This is especially important to promote innovation.
A very important part of making progress, learning and being successful, is failure. Yes, I said failure. If we are not making mistakes, we are playing it safe, and not learning. If we are not learning, we will not grow and continue to improve. We must make it safe for team members to fail if we want to cultivate a high-performing team. The Celebration Grid is an excellent postmortem or retrospective exercise to make it comfortable for the team to talk about failure, success and learning. I made my own wall poster version (see below) so I could add future experiments at the bottom to further emphasize the importance of taking risks with new experiments and thus promoting further learning!
Celebration Grid poster
This setup enables me to walk through the various sections setting the stage for the team to focus on learning and improving and making it safe to talk about mistakes. I ask the team to add their stickies to the poster in the correct location. We then take some time to reflect on the good and bad practices and what we learned. It also solidifies things that went well and should be continued as standard practices! This is an incredibly powerful tool. At the end I type up the results from the session and send out to the team as a reminder on those future experiments, what we want to continue to do and what we do not want to repeat.
Project Close and Credits
Another Management 3.0 technique I really like and have modified and made part of my project work is this concept of Work Profiles and Credits. We all work really hard on these projects and I like to think I give back by helping the people realize the value they have produced. This does require some up-front planning and effort. Let me describe a session I did recently that went very well.
I searched until I found a famous individual that had done many different things well. I picked Angelina Jolie. Her job title is actress, but she has many roles that are part of her profile: filmmaker, role model, and humanitarian, to name a few. Her work profile might be filmmaker and actress based on the roles she has played in dramatic, fantasy and action films. Each acting project she takes on adds to her work profile and to her personal brand and reputation. For this session I used bullet points and created a wall poster to set the stage for the session:
Work Profiles should be a reflection of our personal brands. The more effort we put into growing and shaping our brand, the clearer our value will be, both to ourselves and others. Personal brand apply to the context of our life, not just our current project or role. Our work profile should be a brief description of what we do and what we offer.
Job Titles are useful to help communicate what we do in an organization. This helps understand each other’s job responsibilities. They can also give us a sense of accomplishment as we progress from one to another in our career. Job titles can add to our brand.
Project Roles vary more than job titles; we might have multiple project roles, both inside and outside of our organization. We should see every work assignment as temporary, building work relationships and adding to our brand.
After walking through the points, I ask the team to work on our credits for the project we have just finished. I prepared a draft of the work we had done together prior to the session. I give them each a copy of this and ask them to think about their special credits. This was unstructured and they could write down notes or just think about it.
I transitioned into an exercise to help them with their personal branding. I handed out several sheets listing characteristics and skills. I asked everyone to pick out items that represented their teammates and write them on stickies. Next, add them to the whiteboard under each teammate’s name. I compiled all this data by each individual and added an icon that seemed to represent the data (if possible). I printed these on thick paper and hung them in everyone’s desk area. Now they had feedback from their peers and a start on their personal brand! This session was very successful and I will use it again.
Personal Brand Cards
Profiles and credits are a great way to end a project. It acknowledges everyone’s hard work, reflects on their accomplishments, and my favorite part, it is fun!
I hope you have enjoyed this article on energizing and unleashing team potential. Next month I will discuss leading teams through change. See you next month!
Concepts and images for this article are taken from the Management 3.0 Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders book by Jurgen Appelo and from Management 3.0 website.
Management 3.0 Resources
https://management30.com/product/managing-for-happiness/
https://management30.com/practice/moving-motivators/
https://management30.com/practice/personal-maps/
https://management30.com/product/kudo-cards/
About the Author
Diane Brady, CSM, PMP, PMI-ACP, is an Agile Project Management Professional working in the Pacific Northwest with 18 years of project management and consulting experience working in the Information Technology industry. She is passionate about using agile techniques to create and improve systems, building dynamic teams, and serving teams to achieve amazing results! She has served on the board of the PMI Portland Chapter in the capacity of President as well as active in professional development portfolio for the Chapter and is currently an Agile Instructor.