3 Steps to Building a Cohesive and Resilient Team

 By Chantal Jenoure

The first day your new team is assembled, they are not a team, they are a group of people who have been given a common goal. As a Scrum Master, you will want to do everything in your power to help them achieve that goal. 

One thing I've learnt is that you can't focus solely on that common goal. I realized if I wanted my team to work as a unit and become a team, I would need to be deliberate about it. 

Here are a few actions I took to intentionally build a cohesive and resilient team.

Be intentional about getting to know each other 

1 Free personality tests

These will help you to understand the individuals on your team. You will better understand how they think and approach problems; how they deal with failures and criticisms; what are their strengths and weaknesses. Find a fun activity to help your team members to share their results with each other. This will create an atmosphere where they can find similar traits as well as better understand each other's nuances. 

Tips

> Tap into this free personality test  

You may be tempted to keep the results under lock and key but the true value of this exercise comes from having a common understanding of what makes your team members tick.

16personalities.com

> Find opportunities to tap into your team member's strengths 

Is one of your team members gifted at creatively presenting or summarizing a blocker? Ask that person to help in articulating the help the team may need to keep moving forward.

Unsplash Photo by Mimi Thian

> Find opportunities to balance out their weaknesses 

Is there a difficult task that would make one of your team members get lost down a rabbit hole? Pair that person that is a quick problem solver so that they can benefit from a different approach to solving the problem.

Unsplash Photo by Charlesdelivio

2 Use simple icebreakers to get everyone talking and 'moving as a team'. 

Tips

> Try the 10 Finger Icebreaker game. 

This game is perfect for remote teams. Give persons a heads up that they will need to have their cameras on. Each player holds up their 10 fingers in the air. Starting with one person, who makes a simple statement that is true for them. If the statement is false for anyone else, they put down 1 of their fingers. Last person with a finger wins. For example, I love going deep sea diving. 

©agilecaribbeanlink

>This or that

Have a quick conversation about the preferences of your team members. This is another way you create an opportunity to understand the likes and dislikes of your team members. 

Source: https://www.ricotta.team/blog/this-or-that-questions

 

Source: http://smallthingsinlife.net/fun-instagram-story-templates/

3 User Manual to Me 

This user manual allows your team members to capture their likes and dislikes when working on a team. As the Scrum Master, you can select questions so that you can have a baseline of how to approach various team activities for the team. 

Unsplash Photo by Austin Distin

Tips

Below is a sample. This information can be captured as shown in the image or by using a table in Word. You would share the template with each team member, giving them sufficient time to complete it and advise them when they would share the document with the other members. 

You can also add this activity to your onboarding toolkit for when new members join the team!