5 steps in creating your own Team Player Card
In an earlier post I talked about how a Team Player Card may help build psychological safety in teams. I’ve been asked by a few people about what process should they follow to create one themselves.
Well, I’ve broken the approach that I took down into five steps:
1. Gather your inputs [2–4 hours]
Draw your mind back to all of the off sites and workshops that you have attended, all of your performance review conversations you’ve had and all of the self assessments that you have completed. These are all useful inputs to help start drawing out common themes around your strengths, weaknesses, style and values. Here are a few inputs that I found useful (by no means exhaustive):
- Personality assessments (16personalities.com) — this is based on Meyers Briggs and is free to complete #winning. You can also try these other self-assessment tools that Google’s Project Aristotle used:
https://psychology-tools.com/toronto-empathy-questionnaire/ https://www.truity.com/test/big-five-personality-test
- Strengths assessments (gallup) — helps reinforce your strengths, provides insights into potential areas for development, but it’s not free and you have to pay #notwinning
- Performance review insights — love them or loathe them, regular performance review insights can reveal some interesting truths
- Find your Why — Simon Sinek’s follow up book to ‘Start with Why’ guides you through a step-by-step approach to help find your very own why. I found this exercise useful (but be prepared, it was pretty emotional draining — a future post on this coming soon).
Suggestions:
- I found these four inputs were sufficient in helping me draw some consistent themes. Any more would have been overwhelming and would have ended up being a hindrance.
2. Agree on the sections you want included in your Team Player Card [5- 10 min]
There is no one precise flavour of a Team Player Card. When creating mine, I selected areas that I thought would add greatest value to others in helping them understand me best.
Some other sections that you may want to consider including are:
How do I handle conflict?
What type of personality do I exhibit and what kind of teammate personalities do I resonate with?
How do I recharge throughout the day so that I can handle the pace of work?
How do I expect others to present important information? Do I prefer elaborate explanations or the bottom line up front?
How long does it take for me to develop trust with the people I work with?
What balance of work and life do I expect?
“Time of the day I am most productive”, eg. “In the morning, so I usually block a couple of hours to work on my backlog of stuff”
“How does my system (re)boot”, eg. “I need a strong coffee before my first meeting, otherwise I don’t function well”
“Things that make me smile/laugh”, eg “silly kitty photos”
Suggestions:
- Keep things simple at first by sticking with the majority of the sections listed in the template below and change no more than one section for now. For example, I eventually deleted the ‘what I don’t have patience for’ section due to it being vanilla and providing no meaningful insights into who I was or how I behave at work.
3. Complete lo-fi first version [1–2 hours]
Now here comes the challenging bit — completing your first cut. I used this A3 template:
Suggestions:
- Time box each section to 10–15 minutes and complete your first pass. The last thing you want to do is to get bogged down on one section for an hour and lose momentum.
- Don’t start with ‘My style’ as people tend to find this the most difficult of sections to kick off with. Start with a section that you have some insights to add.
- Don’t get concerned that you are unable to complete all sections with the depth that you would have liked. This will happen naturally over the next few steps.
- Once you have completed your first pass of each section, have some time out. When you’re ready, come back and time box a second pass.
- Keep your first version lo-fi. I printed off the template and used post it notes as I found myself adding/amending /removing points regularly.
4. Get feedback [3–5 days]
Once you’ve completed your first version, type it up into the hi-fi template and circulate it to around 5–6 people.
Suggestions:
- When selecting people to provide you with feedback, make sure they know you and have spent time working with you in the past; make sure they are a diverse mix of people that you have a trusted relationship for them to provide meaningful feedback.
- Be patient in receiving your feedback — some people are busy while others tend to take their time to think deeply and reflect before responding to you.
5. Share, promote and collect feedback [ongoing]
Once you have collected the feedback from your trusted circle, make the relevant updates and create a more visually appealing final version. You usually find that the feedback you receive helps plugs any gaps in your first draft and builds greater depth in your statements.
Suggestions:
- Don’t be shy to share and promote your Team Player Card. I am always looking for different contexts to experiment, including:
New teams just formed
Existing teams that are experiencing communication challenges
Existing teams that maybe just want to continuously improve
Analysing the collective personality traits of the team — gaps, strengths, observations
Helping new starters in the team — present any new starters within the team with a collated document of everyone’s Team Player Cards
Well, I hope this helps to get you on your way to creating your very own Team Player Card. I’d love to hear your comments and experiences if you decide to create one yourself.
