Team Building: Making Values Explicit and a Central Part of the Team’s Work
This article has been adapted from Michael Iannini’s book, Hidden in Plain Sight: Realizing the Full Potential of Middle Leaders.
Start this school year by taking time to appreciate how your team members view the world through the lens of their own values and belief systems. Our behaviors are a reflection of our beliefs, and our belief systems are influenced by our values. Therefore, to ensure team members are intrinsically motivated, and that they appreciate the lens through which their peers view the world, you need to identify and define the values that will influence the work of the team. Furthermore, to mitigate conflict and harness it as a tool to innovate, you need to appreciate how your peers experience and interpret the world differently because of their values and beliefs.
This is easier said than done, as values are very difficult to define, and our answers can be influenced by the context in which we are asked. Therefore, you need to devise a strategy for surfacing values specific to the context of the team. Our values are a reflection of how we feel the world should operate, and when we observe something (news article, movie, student observation) that mirrors those values, it will arouse us emotionally. To surface a person’s values, you need to evoke an emotional response that inspires them.
Continue reading for my most popular team building activity ↓
3 Quote Draw
Spoiler alert, if you find the instructions below complicated, as I did over-elaborate on some aspects, feel free to watch a video demonstration of this activity by registering below. You will be asked for your email address, but the good news is the link to the video and a set of my bilingual quote cards will be emailed to you.
The card game is the best way to surface individual team member values. In any activity you introduce, you need to answer the quintessential question of “why.” Why are we doing this? When you break from routine and ask your peers to engage in an activity they feel doesn’t directly contribute to their work, they will want to know why. The “why” for this activity: to surface personal values related to teaching and learning.
In my experience as a facilitator, I have found that famous quotes appear to be the fastest and easiest way to elicit a compelling emotional response or inspiration. Therefore, to surface individual team member values, you want them to choose a quote that personally inspires them. In order to motivate the team to achieve transformational outcomes, you need their work to also inspire them. You need to connect what you do with who you are. For others to truly understand the emotional response, you need to capture it at the moment that it occurs. Team-building activities require team members to engage in a shared experience and experiencing each other’s emotional responses at the moment.
This activity requires forty to fifty quotes that can come from a range of sources and cultures, including but not limited to sports, business, religion, literature, media, politics, education, and philosophy. Feel free to download my bilingual quote cards, English and Chinese, for free from this link. found my audiences to be equally receptive to the activity. However, be mindful if quotes have sub-context, such as Chinese idioms, several of which require anecdotal context to understand. It is also important to identify the origin of the quote, as sometimes it is not so much of what is said, but who said it, that can excite someone. Ultimately, you are trying to trigger an emotional response, and to accomplish this you need to cast as large a net as possible without making the activity too burdensome.
The main objective of a facilitator is to expose team members to as many quotes as possible in as short of time as possible. As the facilitator, you have already been exposed to all the quotes and probably have even chosen your favorite. Make a copy of that quote and put it aside so that you can share it at the end of the activity. As the facilitator, you are the dealer and have the ultimate responsibility to keep the activity moving. By keeping the activity moving fast, you can prevent analysis paralysis, which will limit the number of quotes a person reads as well as dilute any potential emotional response. The main objective as a participant is to choose the quote that elicited the strongest emotional response upon initially reading the quote. If the quote didn’t trigger a response, then swiftly move on to the next quote.
The following activity will take thirty minutes to facilitate for a team of four to eight people. This activity, though, can be adapted for much larger groups and is a great icebreaker for an entire faculty to participate in. For larger groups, limit table groups to eight people and ensure each group is using the same set of cards.
Preparation for this activity will require chart paper, felt tip markers, and a minimum of forty inspirational quotes printed on cardstock cut to the size of playing cards. Feel free to download my bilingual cards for free from this link. If you are able to laminate the cards, it makes playing easier and the cards will last longer. This game emulates a card game, so create an environment befitting a card game, such as a round table with nothing on the surface that will obstruct the dealing of cards. The rules are simple:
Deal three cards to each participant.
Give each participant one minute to read the cards they have been dealt and select one card they like the most. This may cause some stress at first, so don’t be too strict enforcing the time limit, but do make people mindful of the time.
The other two cards are passed to the left and the dealer discards their two cards by putting them at the bottom of the deck and gives the person on their left two new cards.
Give participants one minute to review and select one card they want to keep and then pass two cards they don’t want to the left.
Continue for 8 to 10 rounds with each person keeping only one card at the end of each round.
For the last round, after participants have selected the one card they wish to keep, have them pass the two cards directly back to the dealer.
At this point, this activity can serve two purposes:
For Faculty Team Building:
Once everyone has selected a card, ask everyone to stand up and separately seek out 3 staff members that were sitting at different tables and share their quote and why they chose it.
Ask everyone to sit down after they introduced their quote 3 times, and heard 3 different people introduce their quotes.
Debrief and close out the activity with these questions:
What did you think of this process?
What have you learned about your colleagues?
Did anyone find another person with the same quote, or get introduced to a quote they wish they had chosen? If yes, what did that feel like?
How can we use this knowledge of our colleagues to drive collaboration?
For the purposes of surfacing values that inspire team members and actions they will be compelled to take; write at the top of a piece of chart paper or whiteboard, visible to everyone, these three questions:
What quote did you choose and why?
What does this quote compel you to want to do?
What personal values (maximum of three) do you think best represents why you chose that quote?
Give participants one minute to quietly consider their answers to those questions. Ensure no one is talking during this time.
Create two columns on the chart paper, and at the top of one write “Do” and at the top of the other write “Values.” Now ask for a volunteer to share their answers.
Give each person two to three minutes to speak; at the end of that time, summarize in the first column, in as few words as possible, actions the quote inspires to be taken, and in the other column the values that the quote represents.
Once every team member has shared, build consensus on three actions and three values the team wants to have at the center of their work. These can later be synthesized into the team’s statement of purpose. (To learn more about this, log in for free to my Goal Setting Master Class)
The values and actions surfaced in this activity become very important team planning tools, not only for developing a Statement of Purpose for the team but also for group norms, meeting management, mitigating conflict, and assessing team health.
