Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction

00:05:13: Ideas for action categories

00:06:14: Ideas for getting closer as a team…

00:06:21: … 1: secret skills

00:09:54: … 2: show and tell

00:10:53: … 3: Spotify playlist

00:13:26: … 4: Desert Island Crisps

00:15:38: … 5: high/low learning

00:17:25: … 6: profiling work

00:22:09: Ideas for working smarter together…

00:22:21: … 1: rock, pebbles and sand

00:28:06: … 2: borrowed brilliance

00:30:37: … 3: give and gain

00:32:07: … 4: invite an expert

00:33:52: Ideas for growing better together…

00:34:08: … 1: knots and needs

00:35:18: … 2: challenge and build

00:36:35: … 3: wouldn't it be amazing if

00:40:36: … 4: be beginners together

00:42:03: … 5: pride postcards

00:44:21: … 6: leader AQA

00:46:31: Extra ideas shared by the community

00:52:36: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper: And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis: And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Every week, we share some ideas and tools that we hope are going to help you to navigate your Squiggly Career with that bit more confidence, clarity and control.  So this week, we're talking about how to make the most of your team time together.  So, whether it is icebreakers, development activities or just fun stuff to do when you're in a room or on a Zoom together, we're going to explore loads of ideas, some that we've used before and they've worked really well, and we've also got lots of ideas from our Squiggly Careers community as well.

Helen Tupper: But before we get started, I feel like we need to just give our listeners a window into our podcast recording world, because you're probably going to hear some of it.  And it's so funny, because I was talking about Squiggly Careers last week on Ali Abdaal's Deep Dive podcast, and I went to where it's all recorded and it was scarily professional.  There was a room that was set up and there were cameras and microphones everywhere and I was like, "Hm, slightly different to Sarah's and my setup", which just as an example, everybody, the reality of recording the Squiggly Careers podcast, I'm at home this morning, I'm having some work done to my house, you may hear some banging because all the windows are being replaced.  I've also got my cat in my office today, she's an indoor cat so she can't be in the house because there's no windows, so she's with me.

Sarah Ellis: An indoor cat?

Helen Tupper: Oh, stop, just because you don't like cats.  My cat's lovely.

Sarah Ellis: It's not I don't like them, I'm allergic to them!

Helen Tupper: Well, I also think you maybe don't like them.  I see no cat care whenever my cat is near you, there's very limited affection!  But also, I was just saying to Sarah, just before we recorded, I could hear some scratching and I realised that my very fluffy cat had got a Post-it Note stuck to her tail and there was just some scratching!  So if you hear scratching, banging or purring, that's just the way that the Squiggly Careers podcast goes, everybody.  At least we're honest and authentic about the way this all happens, but hopefully it doesn't stop it being useful for you and your development.

So, back to the topic of team icebreakers and activities.  We were just thinking, why is this maybe more important now, because we talked about making meetings exciting for quite a long time?  But I think because the way that we work now, lots of people are working remotely, we're not all in the office at the same time, I think the times that we get together really matter for people.  They want to have connection, they want those moments to be memorable, I think they are actually more important than ever.  And I think if you can energise and inspire in those moments, it means the times when people aren't together, that becomes less of an issue. I always almost think it's like concertina culture, if you can bring the team together and really, really make that a really memorable team moment, then the culture kind of expands when people aren't together, and I think you need to do that concertina a few times.  You come together, you really make it memorable, and then people can go away and do their work in their own way.  But if you don't have those moments, I think teams can start to feel a bit disconnected, people can feel like they don't necessarily know each other or know how to work best together, and I think people can start to feel maybe quite isolated when we're working in this hybrid way that is happening now for everybody.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, and it always really strikes me that whenever we ask our team, "What have you particularly enjoyed over the last quarter, or what stood out for you this year?"  It is always the times where we're together as a team.  So, whether it is in a room or on a Zoom, those moments of, I guess it's a little bit of pressing pause from the day job, spending some time learning that informal ability to just have a chat, I do think that the hybrid world means that perhaps those things don't happen as frequently. So to Helen's point, when they do happen you want to put a lot of thought and intention into them.  You don't just think, "Oh yeah, we'll just get together as a team", you know the old-school team development days, where I think people were quite reliant maybe on, certainly if you're in the UK, going to the pub at the end of the day, which doesn't feel very inclusive, especially not for me, because certainly all of my 20s, I didn't drink, I didn't want to be in a pub.  And actually for a lot of people, those more informal social moments are not where you create connection or perhaps not where you feel comfortable. So, I think we've got to really move on from that slightly more ladderlike way of doing team development, or perhaps where it was expected that the leader took control, the leader ran the day, the person in charge essentially, and everyone just sat around and nodded their head for a bit and hoped there was going to be a nice lunch with some sandwiches.

Helen Tupper: Or when you outsource it to somebody else as well, I don't think that's quite the right thing.  I've definitely worked in companies that's like, "It's our annual team day, and we've got a company to run it for us for the day".  I think actually, the more that you can do this within the team, the less dependent you become on budget as well.  Lots of teams haven't got the budget to go and hire other people to help them.  Also, if you can make it a bit smaller, it doesn't have to be a whole day, it can be a ten-minute moment in a meeting or something like that, then you can do this more frequently, which I think is more helpful for people too.

Sarah Ellis: So we have got a lot of ideas for you today.  And so we've so many, we've decided we need some categories.  So we've got three themes that we're going to work through: ideas for getting closer as a team, so connecting and getting closer; ideas for working smarter; and, ideas for growing better.  So, that's just how we've divided them just so it doesn't feel too overwhelming as we go through them. 

Some of them are really quick and simple ideas, some of them will take a bit longer to explain. Then we did ask our Squiggly Careers community on LinkedIn what they had done and any good ideas that they were happy for everybody to share.  So, we're going to end the podcast with three or four that other people shared and give them a bit of a Squiggly shoutout, because people have got some brilliant ideas.  I think it's just really helpful to have all of these things in one place.  That's the way that we'll structure it and we'll write them all up.  You'll be able to find them on the PodNotes, on the PodSheets.  And if you ever need any of the resources and you can't find them, you can always just email us; we're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.

Helen Tupper: So let's get started.  Category number one: ideas for action to help people get closer when you are getting together.  And the first one is secret skills.  So, I often find that when you're chatting to people, there is some kind of secret skill that lots of people have that isn't anything to do with their day job.  It's something that they do outside of work, or it's maybe a skill that they used to have, even like a childhood one. When I did this team meeting in Microsoft, I remember there was a guy called Jeff in my team at Microsoft.  He was brilliant, worked at Microsoft for quite a long time, just a lovely, kind guy really, who was just like, I don't know, I can't really describe it, but Jeff was really generous with his time, he wanted to help everyone, that was just the aura that Jeff had.  And we did this thing around secret skills, and it turned out that he had won medals for breakdancing!  I would not have put kind, generous, corporate Jeff with breakdancing.  And it suddenly helped me to see him in a new light and it's funny and it's a point of connection and you have different conversations.  And I think getting people to share, like what is a secret skill you've got behind the scenes, either that you're using now that people might not know about, or a past secret skill from when you were younger, when you've won awards for some sporting prowess or something, it just sparks some conversation. So, Sarah, what is a secret skill that you have that our Squiggly Careers podcast listeners might not know about?

Sarah Ellis: Well, I qualified to be an aerobics instructor when I was really young, when I was about, I must have been 19, 20.

Helen Tupper: I did not know that.

Sarah Ellis: So, yeah, very much in the grapevine era, like old school, leggings and leg warmers.  I still really like exercise but I really liked aerobics because I've always liked dancing, going to dancing, and it combined dancing and fitness and music; and also, being frank, it was a really good way to earn money when you were young because you got well paid for being an aerobics instructor.  And I think I was never sure whether that might be something that I would end up doing, almost whether it was on the side or in an evening, but I really enjoyed teaching classes.  And now that I think about it, and I know you always understand life when you look backwards and connect the dots, but I think it's probably no surprise that I now spend time supporting people with their careers and I'm really happy to show up and run workshops, because yes, I'm not teaching people to do a grapevine, but I am still happy to be in front of a group, support people to learn and develop, it's just less about the grapevines now more about Squiggly Careers!

Helen Tupper: I dislike the grapevine.

Sarah Ellis: Well what about you?

Helen Tupper: Well, not the grapevine, I can't do it, I literally get my leg into knots.

Sarah Ellis: That doesn't surprise me!

Helen Tupper: Well I think you know my secret skill.  I really love, love, love food and cooking and I think something that Squiggly Careers people probably don't know is that I was on television for my cooking.  I mean, I did not win this television program and I'm not going to tell you what it was, everyone, because I do not want you to google it.

Sarah Ellis: Are you really not going to tell everyone?  That's so funny!

Helen Tupper: I don't actually think you can find it.  I did try to google it, I don't think you can find it any more.

Sarah Ellis: You say that!

Helen Tupper: What, our curious listeners might just use their super-skill of finding my television moment?  Yeah, maybe.  Do I have to say it; do I have to say it or not?

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, come on.

Helen Tupper: Oh, my goodness.  So, it was called Britain's Best Dish, I think it was on ITV.  My dish was not Britain's best dish because I didn't win, but no one was mean.  You know how sometimes on those cookery programmes, they judge it; no one was mean, they were like, "It was a lovely macaroon tower, it's very nice", I was like, "Oh good, I'm glad".  But yeah, there you go.  But anyway, you can have conversations that are different from the day job basically, I think is where we're trying to go. A build on this is idea number two, it's show and tell.  I've done this one as well, works really well.  So basically, people bring in to a meeting, could do this virtually or in person, something that is personal to them.  You could give this a little bit more focus, so you could say, "Bring something you're proud of, or bring something that is a really happy memory", or you could just do show and tell, "Show something and tell us what it means to you".  It's up to you how you do it.  But we did this with my team, and sometimes it's funny, like I remember I did it with a team and someone basically showed a tub of peanut butter.  It was pretty random, and they were like, basically, they had an addiction to peanut butter, which they totally owned!  And they were like, "I get through a jar a day", and you're like, "Oh, that's interesting".  And then, somebody else showed a picture of a nature reserve, which is really personally meaningful for them.  They told the story about why and it was quite an emotional moment. I think show and tell is quite similar to secret skills.  You're just getting a window into someone else's world and making it comfortable for them to share that at work.

Sarah Ellis: So the third idea, which is probably my favourite team icebreaker that I've ever done, we've done it in Amazing If, and actually a few people on LinkedIn also said they've done it, is a Spotify playlist.  So, the way that this works is everybody submits one music track to somebody who's putting together -- I guess they're being the DJ for the day.  You all submit your track and then in the meeting itself, you play a bit of the music, 30 seconds or so, and then people talk about why they chose their track. What I really like about this is I think music matters and is meaningful to everyone in some way.  I'm not super into music or bands or anything like that, but obviously even I could do this.  I still had a track that I was like, "Oh yeah, it would definitely be that for me".  And people tell really brilliant stories around music.  So for some people, it can be really emotional; for other people, it's really fun, or people talk about like an amazing moment on a holiday they went on, I don't know, in Ibiza, that they really remember when they were 18.  And often, some people are very knowledgeable about music.

So, I think you definitely hear different stories, you get a window into people's world and what matters to them.  And what's nice is people can go in whatever direction works for them.  So, it doesn't have to be deep and meaningful.  I think that's one of the things that you have to watch out for, particularly if you're doing team icebreakers and you're just trying to, in a low-key, informal way, have some fun but get to know people.  There are some other exercises we're going to talk about where I think, "Well, that's not the first thing I would do [or] perhaps that's not the first thing I would do if we were getting together for the first time".  But I feel like this one works at any time in a team day and you can do it remotely really easily.  We actually did this in a room just before we were about to go out to have dinner together as a team, and it just teed us up for the evening so well.  And I can still remember a lot of what people shared that evening.

Helen Tupper: I mean I've got the playlist in front of me, it included such tracks --

Sarah Ellis: Have you? Helen Tupper: I have, I have.  Forever Young, Bob Dylan.

Sarah Ellis: I can't remember your track actually.

Helen Tupper: Mine was Free Yourself, Jessie Ware, which is to the point of lots of people had chosen these really meaningful ones and I was like, "It just makes me happy and I want to dance", and everyone else was like, "And this song changed my life".  But people come at music from different things, but I think most people like music, so at the very least, you end up with a very diverse playlist in a team meeting, so it's always quite fun.

Sarah Ellis: And it's quite easy to do.  These things, you don't want them to be loads of work beforehand because everyone's super busy.  I just think everyone can send you one track that matters to them.  If you want something that is even easier, I would argue, and very fun and very quick to do, I actually did this when I worked in a creative agency.  It does feel quite creative agency, I think, in vibe, which was Desert Island Crisps.  This really made me laugh.  Also, people are very passionate about crisps.  I think I'm quite passionate.  I think I'm more passionate about crisps than I am music, to be honest.  And so everybody talks about, if you could only have one packet of crisps, one type of crisp on a desert island, what would you choose? Honestly, I was like, "This is such a dilemma.  There are so many good choices.  What do you go for?"  And you only get to have that crisp.  Now Helen, you are probably one of the few people I know who crisps are probably not top of your list of food that you love, so what would you take?

Helen Tupper: I really don't like crisps.  I know you don't, it's really weird.  No, they're just greasy, and then I know everyone will be like, "But, Helen, you can get them baked now".

Sarah Ellis: There must be something you like?

Helen Tupper: I mean I quite like a cracker, like a sourdough cracker.

Sarah Ellis: Oh my God!  I mean you've literally made me put my head in my hands.

Helen Tupper: I don't know, I really don't like them, I'm sorry, I just don't like a crisp.  But, Sarah, what would your Desert Island Crisp be?

Sarah Ellis: Well, when I did this as an activity, everybody got super into it and people were really passionate about the crisp choices.  Ultimately, I mean it is a very hard choice, but I went with Nik Naks Nice'N'Spicy flavour.

Helen Tupper: Oh my God, they're awful, dreadful, they make your fingers smell.

Sarah Ellis: I know, but they're really, really delicious.  I mean my other option, which you're really not going to like, was Scampi Fries.  If you think Nik Naks are bad, then Scampi Fries are even worse.

Helen Tupper: I mean, you're just validating all the reasons that I do not like crisps.

Sarah Ellis: That you don't like crisps.  Anything like that can be quite a fun way to get started.  When I did that, it was funny how I really remember it.  People had brought in packets of the crisp because they were so enthusiastic about them, which I very much enjoyed.  So the next idea to get closer, this is where some of the ideas do dive a bit deeper.  I think so far, we've talked about things that are essentially icebreakers, secret skills, show and tell, Spotify, Desert Island Discs.  They get you started, they're easy, everybody can get involved. The next one we call high/low learning.  And this typically I think works better in pairs or small groups across the team, you're having mini conversations as part of your team day.  And this is just really simple where you share a high in your career so far and a low in your career. 

You're sharing a high/low story.  I have even done this in an even more depth way, where you shared all of your highs and lows, but that's where we've got a lot of time and people kind of really wanted to get to know each other.  But I just think one high and one low, yeah, everybody can do that.  It hopefully doesn't feel too vulnerable, but it's vulnerable enough.  And it's a great way to get closer to one or two other people in the team.  It's less about everybody together and it's more, well, if I hear Helen talk about a low in her career, you feel empathy, you go, "Oh, I get that other people had lows too" and it's reciprocal, you get to hear about one of mine. I think if you were going to do this, you might want to let people know beforehand so they can have a think about it.  But I would say if you're just doing one high and one low, most people can do this on the spot, and I'm someone who's not very spontaneous and I've done this before not knowing I was going to do it and could come up with things pretty quickly and felt very comfortable doing it. Helen Tupper: If you're doing it virtually, obviously you're going to put people into pairs and breakouts; if you're doing this in-person, I think it's quite nice, you've got a meeting and you might say to people, "Okay, well take half an hour, talk it through, maybe go out of the room".

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, definitely.

Helen Tupper: You know you've got all that noise in one room, I think it's a bit distracting and I think if you want to get people closer together, just say, "Go have a walk and talk about this, or just go find a seat outside this room and all come back together".  I think it just makes that little bit of connection that bit stronger as well.

Sarah Ellis: And then the last idea in this section is doing some sort of profiling work as a team.  This is one that I suspect lots of people listening might have experienced at some point during their career.  There are loads of options for things you can do.  So these are things like Strengths Finder.  We recently did something called Insights Discovery.  Sara Smally on LinkedIn, she recommended one called See Me. So profiling tools, I think, can be helpful.  I think there are a couple of caveats with them.  Firstly, not all profiling tools are equal.  Some of them have much more research behind them, some of them are accredited by the British Psychological Association, so they have much more thought; some of them, when you look at them, they might be fine, they might be quick and easy to do and they might be free, but they perhaps haven't got the substance behind them.  So I think just be thoughtful about which ones you choose.

This is also one of the times where usually it's helpful to have this facilitated by somebody trained in that tool or in that profile.  So, whether that's a coach, they typically are coaches, or an expert in that area, because I think they are the people actually that can make these tools particularly useful.  The tools are always helpful.  Like, who doesn't like filling out a bit of a profile and getting some graphs or some colours or a page where you think, "Oh, it's not like a horoscope".  Hopefully, it's more accurate than that.  But everyone likes reading those things.  But then the value comes from how you use them and the questions that you ask. I really like this example.  So, Laura Bat, on our LinkedIn community, said that her team had a brilliant session with a coach called Simon, Simon Timmons.  What I really liked about this, the reason I wanted to share it is you said he asked this question to the group, "If you want the group to know one thing about you and your personality, what is it?"  And what I love about that is it's not going, well, here's a profile, this is everything about you on a page, and we're just going to give it out to everybody, because I think that's the exact opposite of what we want to do here.  We want to be sensitive, we also want to let people choose. Personality profiles, the ones that are very good, are also really clear, "Oh, our accuracy is around 70%", so there's 30% in those profiles that is inaccurate, that won't feel right for you. 

And also, depending on how well people, the level of trust in that team, I think it's really nice that people get to choose what to share.  So I think as long as you use these profiles as inputs and insights rather than answers, they can be brilliant, they can be useful, but I would always be a bit nervous about taking them too far.  I know sometimes, people really adopt these tools and then they become part of people's email signature and things like that.  At that point, I start to feel a bit more unsure, a bit more uncomfortable about them.  So have fun with them, but basically this is the one where I'm like, do your research, get a recommendation, do a tool that you feel confident in, but get a really good person to come and facilitate that part of your team day for you.

Helen Tupper: I feel like the email signature is the equivalent of when people used to put the profiles on their desk.  I've worked in a company where you'd go around and you'd be like, oh, very red person.  And yeah, I think we don't want to make those assumptions and put people in those boxes, even if they're inadvertently doing it themselves.  I think, as Sarah said, it's what you identify with within this profile, and it's that discussion.  I also think the opposite is useful, what do you not identify with?  Because I think, picking that out and saying, "Oh, no, that doesn't feel like me at all", I think that's quite a powerful conversation.

Sarah Ellis: You can imagine that is exactly what I did!  So, we did Insights Discovery, which was very useful, and I really enjoyed doing it, and it's got a lot of science behind it.  And we had a brilliant facilitator support us with ours.  The first thing I did was go through and highlight everything that I didn't feel was accurate.  And she was like, "Are you a critical thinker?"  And I was like, "Oh yeah, maybe".  And also my profile, the profile for my Insights Discovery was relatively unusual.  And the facilitator tried so hard to be really positive about it.  She was like, "Oh, it's brilliant, you have all of these unusual and different things to contribute".  And I looked at it and I was like, "Is the precis, 'She can be a bit of a nightmare?'"  And I was like, "Oh, God, how do I describe this to the team?"  So I was then trying to really talk up some of the good stuff about the variety that's in my personality. So, I think you can have some fun with them, but we don't want to label people, we don't want to put people in boxes.

Helen Tupper: So that was our first category of ideas for your team meetings to help people get closer.  The second one is all about ideas to help you work smarter when you are together, both in that moment and beyond it. So, the first idea here is called rock, pebbles and sand, and some of you might be familiar with this.  I'll just talk about it conceptually and then I'll say what you do practically.  So, the way I think about this conceptually is, imagine your team and all the work that you do, just imagine an empty jar for a moment, okay?  And then if you fill that jar with sand to begin with, so sand is the equivalent of busy work, lots of small tasks that need to get done.  Let's imagine you fill your glass jar with all the sand, then when you try to put some pebbles on top, it's going to sit on the sand.  So the pebbles are the equivalent of the slightly bigger projects that you might be doing.  So things that might take a bit longer, not the stuff that you can get done easily today, but maybe the things that you might work on, within a week.  That's what we're talking about with pebbles.  So you're going to put pebbles on top.

Then, when you try to put rocks on top, and rocks are like your big strategic priorities, the big objectives that we're trying to achieve this year, because you've gone sand first, those big rocks, basically, they do not fit in your jar, because we started with the wrong thing first.  But if you did it the other way around, if you started with the rocks, the big priorities, and then you put the pebbles in, they would kind of find their way in the gaps, and then you put the sand in, you could basically fit things in a bit better.  That's kind of the concept. The point is, a lot of the time teams start with sand and they cannot fit the big stuff in.  And so what we want to do as a team is understand first of all what do rocks, pebbles and sand look like for us, like what is the actual equivalent of that work in our team; and then, what we should be doing is starting with the rocks first, so who's working on those together; what are the key moments; what are the milestones we're trying to achieve?  And then we kind of fit the other work around it, whereas it often happens back to front, we get consumed by the sand and can't fit the rocks in. 

So that's how it works. Practically what you can do, and you can do this virtually using tools like Miro or Mural, or you can do it in person, you're just going to need a pack of Post-it Notes.  What I would get people to do to begin with, and you might want them to prep this in advance, is on their Post-it Notes, virtual or real ones, get them to write down all the different things that they're doing across a day, a week, and a month.  I would give them three different colours too, like sand -- you're going to need to give them a definition of this. So, sand is the small tasks that need to get done almost on a daily basis, so get them to write all that stuff down.  So I might say, "Oh, approving the social media post, responding to my team on LinkedIn, that would be some of my sand".  You're not saying it's not important, but it is that kind of reactive work that you do every day.  And then, you give them another colour for the pebbles, so those projects that they're working on that might be, for us, I don't know, we're creating some infographics at the moment to bring our Harvard Business Review articles to life. 

That's more of a pebble, because it's a defined project.  And so, you get everyone to write all their defined smaller projects down.  And then a third colour for those rocks, so the big initiatives that they think they are working towards.  So for me and Sarah, that might be working towards a book, for example, that we might be writing.  That's a bigger strategic thing that we're trying to do to get our work and worlds out into the world. Now, everyone preps that, and then you come together and everyone puts their sand down, everyone puts their pebbles down, everyone puts their rocks and then what you're doing is you're taking a step back, so either you're looking at that virtually or in person, and you're trying to see what is this telling us about the way that we're working.  And you often see an awful lot of sand, an awful lot of sand and you're like, "How are those rocks actually going to get done, because we seem to have a lot of sand?  You often see quite a lot of duplication where people might be working on the same things, or it could be efficient if people worked on things together.

What you're aiming for is to reduce the amount of sand.  So, "Do we really need to get that done, is that really important?  If we stopped doing that, what would happen?"  And make sure people are really, really clear, connected and prioritising those big rocks.  And it just gives you a visual way of discussing your priorities and the busy work and making sure the team will understand and align on what we're working on and why we're working on it

Sarah Ellis: I've never done this before, but I can see how it'd be really helpful because when you described it to me, I could straight away give you an example of something where, because we haven't done something like this, we had a bit of work where I'd worked on something and someone in our team had worked on something pretty similar and so there probably was a duplication of efforts. 

So what I really like about this is that transparent mapping out of how we're all spending our time, because I think you think that everybody knows the work that you're doing, but of course people don't.  And so, it's so easy, isn't it, to end up being inefficient, or you're just not getting the gains of people working together, where it would be really useful.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, and I think it's what it gives people a way, because sand doesn't always feel great, because sand can feel like you can't move forward, you know when you try to, not that I really try and run in sand, but it's just hard work, isn't it, when you're trying to kind of go through the sand sometimes; and you can help people, you give them a way to share that, maybe there's some work that's feeling a bit sandy, and it gives them a really comfortable way to talk about it. But also, you might give them some importance.  They might be dismissing that work a little bit and saying, "I do this every day and it feels a bit like sand".  And then you might say, "Yeah, but that's really, really important.  If that's not in place, then we're not going to be able to do that big rock", for example.  So, it just gives you a way of talking about that and a way of people sharing maybe how they're feeling about the work they're doing as well.

Sarah Ellis: Interesting.  Maybe we should give that a go in our next team day.

Helen Tupper: I'm happy to run it.

Sarah Ellis: Okay, brilliant.  Action.  You can have another action; perfect!

Helen Tupper: Great!

Sarah Ellis: So our next idea is borrowed brilliance.  So, we've talked about borrowed brilliance before on the podcast, and this is now a standing agenda as part of every time we meet up as a team.  It's not always the first thing that we do.  We often think about when we're designing our team half days, we very rarely do full days because our team gave us feedback, they preferred a half day.  I'm not sure whether that's like, a full day is too long with Helen and me!

Helen Tupper: A bit too intense!

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, a bit too intense, that probably is true.  But we always have borrowed brilliance.  We do borrowed brilliance in a more ad hoc way using Microsoft Teams, so people can share as we go.  But when we are together, we do ask everybody to talk about one bit of borrowed brilliance.  And we actually did it this week.  We had a team day on Monday, and I just love hearing what everybody has to share.  I mean this week, we had people talk about systems, we had people talk about the sea as in looking after the ocean, we had people talk about economics and their passion for economics, people talking about there not being enough male teachers in primary schools, and so you never know where those conversations are going to go.

Even though with borrowed brilliance, you don't have to connect the dots, I think that's really important -- sometimes people think, "I should have read something or be sharing something where I can then say, 'And this will be useful for our team in this way'", I think you can let go of that constraint for people.  I just think it's just like, "What have you seen that really sparked your curiosity?"  Or you're just like, "Oh, wow, that's brilliant". I was thinking actually recently, and actually I shared it as we went rather than waiting for the team meeting, but the new Ikea adverts, for example, which show families basically buying their products but then not using them because you've got a baby and you were hoping they were going to sleep in the beautiful cot, but then inevitably they actually sleep on you; or your kid, you buy a bed and your kid gets three-quarters of the bed and you're there, like stuck on the corner.  And if you've not watched them, they are absolute genius.  They're one of those ads where you're like, "Oh, if I wish I'd made one ad ever, it's those".  And you just go, "Well, we're not going to make a TV ad. 

And I can't connect the dots in the here and now between why that's so incredible and then what we do day-to-day".  But that's not the point.  And I think you're missing the point if you try to be too linear about this. I think the point is just to spend some time outside of your world, being really curious, and also just, I'm always surprised by what people come up with, so I find it so interesting.  So get borrowed brilliance on your agenda.  It's really easy. it gives everybody space to contribute, and also you are signalling to teams that you value curiosity, which I think is really important.

Helen Tupper: Another idea in the working smarter area is the give and gain activity.  So, this is where everyone talks about something they've got to give, and this could be some experience or expertise, for example.  So I might say to somebody, "One of the things that I have got to give is that I've run innovation teams and I can talk through innovation processes and practices, if that would be useful".  And then I might say, "And one thing that I would like to gain is, I would like to get some more experience of how to grow our podcast with people who aren't aware of it yet", for example.  And as a group, you go around. What you're doing is you're not necessarily expecting somebody in that team to have the knowledge that you need, but what often happens is they might know of something or someone who does, and someone might say, "Oh Helen, actually I'm about to put a process in place. 

It's not an innovation process, but I'd be really interested in the steps and structures of how that process was created".  And so my give, it becomes useful to somebody else; and that thing I want to gain, they might think, "Actually, I was at an event the other week and there was someone speaking on stage about podcast growth, it was this person, you might want to get in touch with them". This idea of give and gain means that you're tapping into the knowledge that you don't always see on the surface, like often people know other people or they've done other things that they don't talk about on a day-to-day basis, and give and gain kind of activates it, so it's a way you tap into that knowledge.

Sarah Ellis: So, our final idea in working smarter is, invite an expert.  And though we think it's really important to take accountability and ownership as a team for how you spend time together, bringing the outside in is often really useful, and I think here really consider what experts are going to be helpful for everybody.  And so, for example, in our team day on Monday, I had heard from a lot of the team that they wanted to develop their strategy skills.  Now people have said that in different ways and for different reasons, but it was a common theme.  So I'm always on the lookout for common themes in terms of learning, because then you think, "Well, great, if lots of people are broadly interested in strategy, who do I know who's a real expert in that area who might just come and spend 45 minutes or an hour with our team?" So we had one of my brilliant friends, Rob George, come along, a real expert in strategy, though he's very humble and doesn't describe himself in that way, but I know he's brilliant at what he does.  And in my head, the process I'd gone to was, "Well, who's my go-to guru?  So, when I think about strategy, who's the go-to guru that I can connect and ask to then come along to our team and share their wisdom with everybody else".  And though you might think, "Oh, it's hard because everyone's busy", in my experience, people are really flattered to be asked.  There's often some reciprocal swap that you might do along the way, it doesn't have to be in that moment, but obviously, if Rob then asked me to come and talk to his team, no pressure though, Rob, who does listen to this podcast, obviously I'm going to say yes and try and make that happen. So this is really people helping people in action.  I think it's just nice to have a different voice in the room when you get somebody from the outside, and I think it brings a different kind of energy to the day as well.

Helen Tupper: And our third area for ideas for your team meetings is around how you can use these ideas for action to grow better together.  So, think about this as improvements or efficiencies, celebrating successes, all those kinds of things that bond you. The first one here is knots and needs.  So, we all have knotty moments in the work that we're doing.  It might be a deadline that's feeling really difficult, or a budget that's been cut so you can't do this thing the way that you were planning to do it, or maybe sometimes it could be a stakeholder; sometimes it could just be a really difficult stakeholder who's just making everything a lot harder.  And in a high-trust team, you should be able to talk about these knotty things. 

And I might say, "I'm working on this project at the moment, but I'm really feeling like the energy has gone from it and it's starting to stall".  That's my knotty moment that's happening at work.  "What I really need is some ideas from you as a team on how I can get people reconnected with what we're trying to do and re-energise it because we've got another six months before this is ultimately going to be completed". Having that framework of what's a knot that's not feeling so great or not helping you to do the thing that you want to do, and what do you need, enables the team to come together to try to solve some of those problems for you, or at least maybe get yourself a bit unstuck if that knot's feeling like a bit of a blocker for you. The second idea in this area about growing better is challenge and build, and we have talked about this before.  So, this is where you might be working on something and sometimes you get a bit too close to it.  So, let's say Sarah and I are working on an outline for another book that we want to do and we might be getting quite emotionally connected to that idea because we're like, "This is the best idea ever!"  Actually creating some time where people put that idea or that concept, or whatever it is they're working on, to the team and you frame it as a challenge-and-build session, what it does is it helps you to be a bit more objective because you're inviting the team to challenge that idea and say, "It might not work because…" 

But then, what they also have to do is build, "But what would make it even better is..."  And so, it helps a team to practice feedback in a really safe environment, it means that people don't hold their ideas too tightly, and it also means that people feel like they're part of something. I think occasionally when we have an idea that we really feel great about, we can sometimes work on it in isolation from other people.  But the fact that they have had an input and that you have listened and hopefully included some of those things, means that everybody feels part of it even when everybody's not responsible for working on it.

Sarah Ellis: And so our next idea, which I love obviously is, wouldn't it be amazing if; the clue's in the title about why I like this so much.  But we have done this as a team, and actually I've heard of a couple of organisations doing something similar but probably named in a slightly different way.  And this is just giving everybody the permission to really, I think, fast-forward and think about the future and be really ambitious about what you are trying to achieve as a team, so, "Wouldn't it be amazing if…" Maybe it's to do with ways of working, maybe it's to do with what you deliver for customers.  But I think the really important point here is getting everybody to let go of the reality that normally gets in the way of the "wouldn't it be amazing ifs", because we think, "I don't know how we would do that; I don't know how we would make that happen".  Everybody's worst critic naturally kicks in.  Whereas this is just going, "Okay, well let's imagine we've got full freedom.  What is the answer to that question, 'Wouldn't it be amazing if?'" When we did it as a team quite recently, I was also quite surprised by some of the things that people came up with that they would love to see Amazing If achieve, and it challenged some of my thinking, it took us in a slightly different direction. 

Again, you might want to give people a bit of time by themselves.  I do think during team days, remembering that some people will find team days quite draining towards the end, because it's a lot of time with people, particularly if you're there for a longer period of time, actually factoring in a bit of alone time, says the introvert of the duo, can be quite useful. So I think for this exercise, the way that I would normally design it is I'd say to everybody, "Take 15 minutes, use it, grab a coffee and write down what ideas you've got for, 'Wouldn't it be amazing if' for our organisation [or] for our team", so you've given a time for people to think.  And then, get everybody back in the room and then you just take it in turns sticking up or visualising these "wouldn't it be amazing ifs".  You could do it in small groups and then maybe as a small group, you share with the other group; or if you're a smaller team, you could perhaps just do it all together in a room.  But I really like how liberating this feels.  And though you could argue, does it feel a bit demotivating, because often it's quite far away from where you are today; my observation is it does the opposite.  Everyone gets quite excited about things and maybe you realise you are on the way to some of those things, or you could do some things differently that might get you closer to some of those really big, shared ambitions that everybody would feel really proud of.

Helen Tupper: And if you're a manager, this can be a really, really insightful exercise about what you can do to excite and also enable your team.  So when we did it, everybody knew what we were doing in advance and they'd written down as many "wouldn't it be amazing ifs" as they could think of.  And so, the first ones were almost, I guess sort of not predictable, but sensible, I suppose, and then they got crazier and crazier.  And what I was doing was trying to almost theme them.  As I was listening, I was like, "Okay, they are all very different.  However, I can see some areas of connection". So, for example, some of the ideas across the team for us were about, "Wouldn't it be amazing if all of our information was in one place?" and more than one person said that, of some description, maybe if not the exact words, it was the sentiment.  And I was like, "Oh, clearly that is really on people's mind.  And one way that I could help them is, just how do we do that; what would it look like; what do we need to stop doing for that to be possible?"  And then on the other end of the scale, it was things like, "Wouldn't it be amazing if we could transform education [or] wouldn't it be amazing if we could talk about Squiggly with Oprah?"  And it was just, "Oh, okay!"

Sarah Ellis: I know, that one really threw me!

Helen Tupper: I know, I love it.  But people want some of these really big, like really, really big, far-out, sort of like the moonshot ideas.  And it's like, people want the practical and the moonshots at the same time.  And it was good to hear that.  And so as a manager, I think, obviously you can share your "wouldn't it be amazing ifs", but really, really make sure you're listening to the intent behind the ideas, I suppose.

Sarah Ellis: And the next idea is, be beginners together.  I think this actually could have gone in getting closer as well as growing better.  I think this actually does two things.  So, we recently did this with Scriberia, who basically teach you to draw.  You know how everybody thinks they can't draw unless they are artists?  It's often one of those fixed mindset moments lots of us have like, "Oh, I'm just not good at drawing [or] maybe I'm just not creative".  And so Scriberia joined for one of the events that we were doing, actually, and we got everybody to just learn a bit about drawing and have a go, and give yourself permission to start from scratch and not expect anyone to be particularly great at it. So there's something about that in terms of (a) it challenges our brain in a different way, but also (b) it kind of unites us all in terms of probably feeling a little bit uncomfortable, but then you're all having a go together.  I saw some other examples of people talking about learning to cook.  We're actually doing that later on in the year.  I've wanted to do things like sushi-making a few times, but that's surprisingly hard to make happen. But the other one that we've done, and actually this was done remotely, is we sent everybody some clay and we did pottery making.  Very messy, but everybody's kids also loved it and liked getting involved.  But again, it was this thing of something very different from your day-to-day, but where everyone actually really enjoys the sort of, I think, freedom to play and to be playful.  So anything you can do to be a beginner, I think it's always helpful. The next idea we've got, which I love, and again, we've done this in our team a few times now, and it's always such a brilliant moment, we get everybody to write their pride postcards and then read them out loud. 

Now, if you've got a team of 100, that probably doesn't work, you probably need to kind of break people up into smaller groups.  I think if I'd got a team of 100, I'd be thinking, "Well, how can I put people in groups where they don't work with those people day to day?" so you get to hear pride postcards from different teams, because I think that would always be really nice to do.  And it doesn't have to be long. I mean, if it was me, and this is very me, I would take this too far.  I actually want the postcard.  I'd want to be printing the postcards out, particularly if you were together in person, and I'd be giving everyone a postcard and be like, "Right, go away and write it.  What are you proud of in the last quarter?"  I would keep it quite short, I think, in terms of this is not designed for people to share all of their life story.  It's, "So far this year [or] in the last quarter, that what are some of the highlights to you; what for you, what was on your pride postcard?"  And then, I do think the power in this is not really the writing down, it's the people saying it out loud and encouraging people to own their successes and the stuff that they've done that's really good and that makes them feel really good, and for everybody to celebrate that success together. It's a lovely activity and one that you see people sort of, they're a bit apologetic about it because like no one likes to talk about all the good stuff out loud, but you can also see people growing in confidence and then just feeling great about themselves, which I think can never be a bad thing.

Helen Tupper: I loved hearing the team talk through these and just understanding a bit more about what was really meaningful to people.  Because for some people, it was almost like they were proud of what they were delivering; and for some people, it was like the way that they were managing their life, because they were juggling or because they were doing something they'd not done before.  And I think it was important for them to acknowledge these things that they were proud of.  But it was also just a really nice thing to hear and celebrate.  Yeah, it was lovely.  Not a conversation that you have every day; I think that's why the pride postcard, it just creates that space for everyone to do it.  And yeah, a lot of people wrote down the list.  I did what Sarah did, I drew on my iPad, I literally drew a postcard.  I was probably the only person who took it that literally.  I'm not surprised that you would do the same! Then our last idea for action on growing better is called leader AQA, so this is Any Question Answer.  And what this does is it creates a space for the team to ask their manager any kind of question.  I think for managers, it can feel maybe quite vulnerable, because you might not know what those questions are in advance, but people could submit them. 

You could use something like Typeform or Slido, so that people could submit questions to you in advance.  The advantage of using something like Slido is that people could upvote them as well. So you could send a link to the team, you could say, "I'm going to do an AQA in our next meeting together.  If you've got questions, you can submit them anonymously here, and you can also look at what's been submitted and upvote them".  So you can do that, or you could just do it in the meeting, whatever works for you.  But what this does is it gives people a chance to ask maybe some tough questions that they might not at work.  They're like, "Oh, do I ask this in a one-to-one?  I don't want to put this on email".  There could be all kinds of confidence gremlins getting in the way of them asking those questions, and you suddenly make it very, very safe for that to happen.  And it means that people can hear the same messages. So you might have one brave person in the team who asks you this question in the one-to-one, but then it doesn't necessarily get shared across the team.  But it means that everyone can hear it, it is coming from you, you know what matters to people, and you create a safe space for them to ask those questions.  So, there's quite a lot about the consistency of your communications and the psychologically safe culture you're creating just by doing this leader AQA in a meeting.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I worked with a company recently where they do this and they do use Slido.  It's always anonymous and everybody does the upvoting, and they've just got so used to doing it, it's become like a ritual and a habit for them, that they were like, "We get questions on absolutely everything and anything".  So, it's just created this openness where they know leaders are prepared to answer any question.  So, I just think it's a really nice thing to do and particularly actually might work for something like using Slido anonymously, that would work for really big teams very well.  In our team which is quite small, I think if you upvoted it you're like, "There'd be five votes", and it wouldn't quite have the same impact!  I think the principle is a really good one. So, a couple of extra ideas to finish from our brilliant community on LinkedIn, and there were some lovely ones that people shared, so thank you to everybody who got in touch and gave us their ideas.  Sarah Worth suggested a version of PechaKucha.  We'll put a link to PechaKucha in the PodNote and in PodMail, where we put everything about the podcast.  But essentially this is, you share a number of slides, it's normally 20, Sarah said her team actually do 10, so again, play around with what works for you. 

But every slide is timed at 20 seconds. So, what's nice about this is you get rhythm and energy, it's fun and it's fast, it's the opposite of the death by PowerPoint that we've probably all experienced.  And I think you usually give people a theme.  So you might just have a theme of, who am I?  That's the question, "Who am I?" 10 slides, 20 seconds each.  If everyone did that, it's fast, it's furious, it's fun.  Everyone will do that in a slightly different way.  Maybe you do one per team meeting, or maybe everybody has a go.  But it's a really nice format for people to have a play with. Georgina Bowers shared that they do something called a team agreement.  I have done this before in a few different ways.  What I really like about this is, you are very clearly as a team signing up to, "Right, how are we going to work together?  How are we going to use tech?  How do we make decisions?  How are we going to celebrate success? 

How do we resolve issues?"  And as Georgina rightly says, a brilliant way to build psychological safety, create a climate of trust.  I've done this a few times in leadership teams in particular, and it's been so useful.  The thing that I've never experienced done quite so well is keeping it alive, but I really like the idea here of the transparency of this.  We've actually talked about this at Amazing If, like how do we write down how we do things day-to-day, how we do operate as a team.  We haven't got there yet, but it's definitely something we've got in mind, so I really liked that one. Celeste Gupta shared that she went to something organised by a thinktank called Sigma Squared Society.  I was like, "Oh, sounds fascinating".  And during the day, every group was given a problem to solve, but they were presented with the topic a couple of days before.  Everyone was asked to do some research, so you got some time to think and come up with some solutions.  So you were allocated a topic, and then you went into a Slack group, but during the day you were brainstorming and learning together.  It sounded like it was all brilliantly moderated and if you went off on a tangent, everyone was brought back to, "Well, what's the problem we're trying to solve here?" What I really liked about this one, which was the first time I think I'd seen an idea in this way, was connecting the "what we do before" with "what we do in the moment", and giving everyone a bit of space to go off and do their own thing.  And I suspect those discussions were better because of it.  If someone just said to me, "Okay, well, how are we more innovative in our processes?" I'm not great on the spot, and I'm not spontaneous.  But if I know that we're going to be talking about that, I might go away and read something, listen to a podcast, or it's just percolating in my mind.  So, I really like that connecting the dots with the before and in the moment. Then Louise Emily, who is an artist and does loads of really interesting workshops, she had one which was about getting closer and connected, a bit like some of our Spotify ideas, where she asks people to introduce themselves and rather than just saying your name and your job title, which always feels a bit boring, and then often if you go, "Oh, tell me something interesting about yourself", I think often everyone's like, "Oh, no, but I'm not interesting".  So no one enjoys usually doing that activity.  But she actually asks people to share a story about their name.  And I was like, "Oh, actually I can really see how that would work".  For me, I already know the story that I would tell, even though I've got the most popular name in the year that I was born.  I mean, that's a story in itself, right? But again, it's a really simple way, I think particularly if people didn't know each other, or if perhaps you were coming together maybe as a network or a cross-company team, that might be really nice.  Like, "Oh, hi, I'm Sarah, here's a story about my name that's interesting".  It gets everyone started, kind of releases any tension of that awkward introduction, because I think people do often get quite tense about introducing themselves.

Helen Tupper: You reminded me actually of Andrea Pattico, who is Chief People Officer at a company called MVF, told me about a really good "what's in your name" team meeting exercise you could do, or a department one, which is actually really good for diversity and inclusion.  Not everybody uses the name that they were born with, at work, and there can be all kinds of reasons for that.  Maybe their family gave them sort of, they were born with one name, but they were always called a different name by their family, and that's the one they use at work.  Or maybe, a lot of people have like an anglicised version of their name to make it more comfortable for other people to say, and that isn't the name that they were born with, and actually they've lost some of their own identity in that process. So, "What's in your name, what was the name that you were born with, and what's the name that you use at work?" it creates all kinds of stories.  It might be you might end up saying, "Oh, this is a nickname, and this is how long I've been called it".  Or you might say, "Actually, my name at work is John, but actually that's not the name that I was born with".  And again, you get this insight into people's lives that can enable them to talk about their identity outside of work that might not feel fully represented in work.  And I always thought that was a really powerful idea.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah, I love that.  And actually, even thinking of my dad, my dad was christened John Mark Ellis, but was always called Mark, always, like all of his friends, everyone at work called him Mark Ellis and you're like, it's such a weird story, that's nothing to do with identity, that was just to do with his mum and dad being like, "Oh, we prefer the way that it sounds, John Mark Ellis, but then we're going to call him Mark", I'm like, "Why?"  It never ever made any sense to me!  But again, he could have told that story and you're like, no one would have known that his first name was actually John, that he was christened John.  And so I think, like you say, it's one of those where it sounds quite small but I think it could get quite significant.

Helen Tupper: Yeah, exactly, names that you've been called or nicknames you've had.  Everyone's probably got a story about their name and then how that story's made them feel as well, so it can be quite enlightening. So, hopefully you've managed to keep on top of all those ideas, but don't worry if you haven't because we'll summarise as many as we can in the PodSheet for you.  And it might be worth just sending the PodSheet round to your team and saying, "Which one of these should we do first?" and seeing which one they've got the most energy for, and then hopefully between listening to this podcast and reading the PodSheet, you've got all the information that you need to get started with it. But if you do have any questions at all, you can always just get in touch with us.  We're helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com.  And if you've got other ideas, let us know, because we would love to give them a go and try them out with our team.  And if we get a deluge of other ideas, we'll find some other way to share them.  So please get in touch if you have any questions, get in touch if you've got any more ideas you'd like us to add to our list.

Sarah Ellis: So thank you so much for listening and we hope you found that useful, and we're back with you again soon.  Bye for now.

Helen Tupper: Bye everyone.