The day-to-day activities many organizations face can often be personally taxing on your team. Especially in high pressure situations, we can let our emotions and stress negatively impact how we treat each other as teammates.
We recently facilitated a session with a local children’s cancer foundation and started with an activity we found extremely impactful that you might consider using with your own organization. Working in such an emotionally taxing field, we were excited to see how simply this lifted the spirits and comradery of a team that has such a significant impact in our community.
We call this activity The Brilliance I See in You. It’s quite simple. Each person has a piece of paper taped to their back with the phrase, “The brilliance I see in you…” printed in the middle of it. In a quick 15-minute exercise at the beginning of the strategic planning session, each team member went around and wrote a response on the piece of paper.
At the end of the exercise, everyone removes the paper and gets to read the notes left by their team. In this instance, it really helped lift the spirits of their team and bond each other before starting their strategic planning session.
It might feel and sound sort of sappy, and it is. But it makes an amazing impact in connecting your team and is a good exercise to complete before starting a planning session.