Dear team leader, do you wish that your team could form into a harmonious unit, but quickly & deeply?
Teamsquare is a practice that collects individual desires & gifts into a marketplace, facilitating connections amongst the team members.
It ain’t a novel idea, but after a decade of Agile Coaching, I’ve been told it’s a very helpful one, so consider this my gift to you. Happy perpetual Holiday-of-your-choice.
like a town square, but for teams
How It Works
Setup: It starts with an empty board of two columns, titled “Want” and “Give”.
Input: Team members each think up one-to-three things (objects or experiences or skills) that they are willing to share with the team that they want, and one-to-three things that they are willing to share with the team that they can give.
Action: Get together for all to share these things as stickies, into the appropriate column of the board. Each sticky has three components: a short name for the “want” or “give”, the initials of the sticky’s author, and the level of this want or give (“1” for “low”, to “3” for “high”). With a populated board, the team can now inspect what has been shared. (If none of this can happen all at the same time, or in the same place, it’s possible to conduct this asynchronously and virtually using your online whiteboard collaboration tool of choice.)
Output: This populated board facilitates opportunities for conversations offline, hopefully leading to connections amongst the team members, specifically ways to help each other by matching stickies from each column, i.e., what one team member wants can be matched with what another can give. How these matches are addressed is then handled autonomously: up to the relevant team members of each match.
Iteration: While there is value from going through the steps just once, group inspection has often immediately sparked another round of adding stickies, with folks either effectively adding their name to a want or give, or creating a match.
like a town square, but for teams
How It Works Better
For this to be most useful, it requires a regular revisiting of the Teamsquare board, usually at a weekly-to-monthly scheduled gathering of the whole team.
Particular utility comes from how balanced a thing is mentioned across the columns, analyzed like the board represents a marketplace, which is where I like to start using the terms “supply” and “demand”.
- If there is an equal mention of a thing’s supply and demand, then there can be an internal satisfying of the market. This is the simplest utility.
- If there is a greater mention of a thing’s demand than supply, then the team leader can organize to bring in external supply, to satisfy the clearly identified internal demand.
- If there is a greater mention of a thing’s supply than demand, then the team leader can organize to… seek out external demand, to “shop around” the clearly identified internal supply. Interestingly, there is still an opportunity from having the “suppliers” meet: if there is variety in the quality of the supply, then sharing amongst the “supply-side” can possibly raise each team member’s individual supply, e.g., it’s unlikely for subject matter experts to all know the exact same material, so this purposeful sharing of variances in expertise can improve every individual’s expertise.
like a town square, but for teams