Beginning of March, before COVID19 hit us, I gave a “trust & values” workshop for a “business development” team, that is supporting their company as Product Owners and project managers. As part of this session, we sketched value- or team motto posters, which I want to publish here as the main part of this post.
There might be value in this post for you if
- you are looking for inspiration for team-building workshops around trust and collaboration
- you are an enthusiast for fun office decoration or simple, partly ironic value- or motto posters.
First:
Why this workshop?
It was a really fun session, both for the team and even for me as a workshop moderator, since I very much enjoy working with teams where the internal chemistry is right. They already had done a session on trust and teamwork, but we wanted to double down on this one to get as concrete as possible. Getting concrete to me means, achieving actionable or publishable results. And, hell, we got those!
Why Motto-Posters?
Values and behaviors are culture put into action. To change this, there needs to be problem awareness. And how better to create problem awareness than by wallpapering the office with such things?
Second: How did we get there?
Our rough agenda was:
- What does trust and good collaboration mean for us?
- Using post-its from the previous session and adding things
- Re-doing the clustering
- Generating concrete instructions (as of Simon Sineks “Start with Why”)
- We took some time to fill company internal evaluation sheets, but for the first time as a 360 for one another (instead of only team member & manager input)
- Including analysis and
- Sharing and talking it through
- We designed our own value posters
- All of us did sketches of how a motto-/value poster might look like
- We did two Joharis:
1st Johari: Behavior
| Behavior | by us | by others |
| towards us | ||
| towards others |
2nd Johari: Expectations/tasks
| Expectations/tasks | by/from us | by/from others |
| towards/for us | ||
| towards/for others |
And we concluded the session with an intense but supremely helpful SWOT analysis:
| SWOT Analyse | Intern | Intern | |
| Strengths | Weaknesses | ||
| Extern | Opportunities | Expand | Catch up |
| Extern | Threats | Protect | Avoid |
You might wonder: SWOT analysis for team building? Yes, definitely! SWOT to me is a problem-finding and problem-solving framework that can be used in almost any situation!
Third: The actual value posters
So much for the contents of the workshop (of course I’m open for discussion), but the main reason for this blog post is to share the incredibly amazing ideas for value posters or team motto posters. I won’t share the sketches by the team and myself, but I will share what I made of it in a few evenings of low level Photoshopping.
Finally: Conclusion and Happy End
Feedback from the team was really great. Some of those posters have made it to the walls of their actual office space. Long-term effect on team motivation is hard to tell, because this was shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown started. But either way: The team has already had a lot of fun creating these. I have had fun refining them and I hope you’ll have some fun taking a look.
(Or else at least got some workshop inspiration from the agenda I shared.)
Summary / Motto poster how-to:
- Collect aspects of trusts, values and how the team sees collaboration
- Cluster into groups
- Extrapolate concrete behaviors and actions
- Translate to more casual, almost colloquial phrases
- Draft motto posters