Team bonding

One of my first posts was about teams and why they can be successful. To sum it up, there are five factors:

  • A common goal
  • rules
  • role awareness
  • dependency on each other for reaching goals
  • awareness of this dependency

What I want to elaborate today is how you can make a team bond more quickly and develop more trust. Mind you that I am strictly speaking from a basketball coaches perspective here. But I feel that some of these things can be applied to any business team as well.

Have you ever seen teams at the Olympics or world championships that grow beards or shave their heads? It’s not too seldom a sight, actually. So what’s the deal behind looking, well, shall we call it interesting? It’s a ritual to show that team members belong together and have committed to a common goal. I don’t suggest that you all grow beards now (though they look damn good I have been told), but I suggest that you have team rituals. And if you are in a scrum team, that’s an easy thing to have: you do have your regular ceremonies, don’t you? And you always have everyone take part, don’t you? And you have everyone put their phones in silent mode, don’t you? Enough question, I think you get the point. If you start letting people get away with not taking part, your rituals start deteriorating, so better don’t have any exceptions.

Dependency on each other and awareness of this dependency can be talked about a lot, but sometimes exercises will speed things up. And since gamification has grown mainstream, we can of course call these games instead of exercises. I will describe three of these exer…games. There are tons more, but I will limit the number to these three since I have actually used these before (with basketball teams, mind you).

Human snake

Do you remember snake from your old Nokia cell phone? Well, it’s a bit like that. Have your team line up in a row about 30cm apart, facing in the same direction. Now put a balloon (oh, I didn’t mention that, well you need inflated balloons) between every two people. People mustn’t touch the balloons with their hands and balloons mustn’t touch the ground. There is your human snake, now let your snake move through the room. People will have to communicate and depend on each other to do so. If you want to complicate things or make them more competitive, you can let two snakes race each other.

Commercial

No, no balloons this time. You will need a video camera, though (shouldn’t be too much of a problem nowadays). And you need some more time. I suggest a time box of about 30 minutes. Your team is film crew and they are supposed to film a commercial why they are the best team around. The commercial shouldn’t be longer than 20-30 seconds. This is a fun way to have a team think about themselves and what defines them as a team. Make sure, though, that it is really about putting their strengths into focus and not bashing other teams. And there is nothing like looking at these after two or three years…

Sitting in a circle

Doesn’t sound too challenging, does it? Well, there is a twist to it. Have your team line up in a circle, still standing. Everyone looking at someone’s back. Now have everyone sit down on the thigh of the person behind them. Most of the time this works only if people trust each other and if it is done simultaneously. This exercise nicely shows that a team is more than the sum of its’ parts and that it needs understanding of depending on each other.

 

As I said before, I have used these exercises in a basketball context with positive results. More often than not there will be remarks like “Oh, I didn’t know we could really do that” or “Yeah, that really works if we work together”. I have not done any of these with scrum teams. If you have, please let me know your experiences. While I can easily imagine the first two, I am a bit skeptical about the third one. Might be a bit too physical.