Why would building your team be risk taking?  Well, it might require you to do something you are not comfortable with!

As we continue through what feels like an endless Covid lockdown, I am seeing dozens of articles on what I should do as a leader to build team cohesion and attend to their individual well-being.

A lot of the advice is straight forward and makes a lot of sense.  For example, take time at the start of the meeting to see how everyone is doing.  We should be doing that even when Covid is not around; as leaders we should always have sense of who on our team is doing well and who is struggling.

But some of the advice seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. Like, play games with your team!  Ok, when we used to all get together for “team building” we would do fun things. But, as a normal part of business, on Zoom?

To a person like me who is both an introvert and fairly quantitative, that just feels stupid.

However, I am open to trying new things.  I know I have blind spots and sometimes see things differently than others. So, I decided to ask my team.

At our staff meeting two weeks ago I asked, “would you be interested in playing some games as a staff or would that just seem stupid, like corporate style forced fun?”  (I actually said both “stupid” and “forced fun.”  We have pretty open communication as a team).

To my surprise the team unanimously said: “let’s play a game!”

So the next week we all sent two “fun facts” about our self to someone outside the team who compiled them into an anonymous anonymized and randomized list. Then, in last week’s staff meeting, we spent 20 minutes trying to guess who interviewed for the CIA and who was a music video body double.

We laughed more than we had over the past three months and we now know more about each other than we ever did.  Each fun fact had a story behind it and everyone wanted to know it.

My team is tighter and in better spirits now. It just took the risk of doing something that felt stupid to me.

Now, I am off to plan next month’s game!