Which Team Shaping Plays can help your team become more effective today?

[#1]

Based on the latest research from Atlassian, only 13% of teams are considered truly effective. And with 65% of teams being hybrid or fully remote, it’s no wonder we’re having trouble connecting and being our most effective selves.

Creating a shared understanding - that feeling where everyone on the team understands their mission, purpose, and what needs to get done to deliver on goals— is critical to building high-performing, effective teams. 

But where do you even start?

The Atlassian Work Coaches know how challenging this can be for teams. So, they’ve curated a set of Team Shaping Plays designed to help your team understand what they should be doing and why, in order to achieve their goals. Those Plays are:

• Team Poster

• Roles and Responsibilities

• Network of Teams

• Working Agreements

Each Play contains expert facilitation trips, tricks, and examples to make your Play a success. However, there’s a lot we can share and learn from each other. That’s the purpose of this post.

Please comment below to share and discuss which Team Shaping plays could help your team become more effective.

Here's the prompt: Name at least one of the Team Shaping Plays your team could benefit from running today. Explain why and how.

Bonus prompt: If you’ve already run one of these Plays, how did it go? What advice would you give another team running the Play?

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Thanks all! Looking forward to reading your thoughts and ideas.

[Jeff Hooper]

My small, 5-person IT project team is generally pretty effective and efficient, as we develop a new product. But we run into problems as we integrate with the rest of our small company and its other small teams, which are mostly focused on maintaining and enhancing current production systems. As a company, we are quite inefficient in being able to quickly determine responsibility for a particular issue. Our default is "OK, persons A, B, and C all have knowledge in that area, so one of us needs to get with the customer on that today...," instead of simply assigning the issue to the responsible person. So the effect is either (1) multiple people chasing the same issue, or (2) each person thinking that another will take the issue - and it gets ignored. We need to run the "Roles and Responsibilities" Play, and we need to utilize Jira Software across the entire company (not just on our one development project, where its use has dramatically improved our efficiency).

[Andy Gladstone]

Roles and Responsibilities. 

Our Team is so focused on customer success we often veer way outside our own lanes in trying to satisfy the customer or complete a project. While everyone striving for excellence and for a goal together is great, the blurring of lines carries over and other projects/requirements/tasks (a.k.a. Balls) get dropped while juggling responsibilities that are not really in our JD. Over time this causes the team to become dysfunctional since so much individual ownership is overpowering team responsibilities. 

[Amanda Barber]

While I think we could benefit in some way from all of these, the team I spend most of my time with (engineering) could definitely benefit from Roles and Responsibilities. I think it would really help clarify responsibilities for the team members, and myself! With our company being rather small, many of us wear several "hats" so the lines get blurred frequently. I'd love to have teammates do some reflection prior to running this play.

I love the idea of doing Network of Teams at our upcoming retreat and then kind of making a larger, company-wide diagram...which would only work because we're a small and mighty company of ~30 people. :) 

[Fotios Kantzos]

I think our team would take the benefit Roles and Responsibilities as we are a new team and this would help us a lot to clarify our roles, responsibilities etc.

I liked the idea of Team Poster Play and the fact that you can share.

[Roberto Garzon]

My team works on the integration of Salesforce with mobile devices so our sales personnel can work on contracts while they are on the road. This project brings together teams from different groups with on the company and from multiple locations within the US and Europe. I think that having a working agreement as well as a team poster will promote clarity and a concise mission for the workload that needs to be accomplished.

[Roy Oscar]

I like the idea of team plays - With the roles and responsibilities play it helps to outline all of the functions that make the team gel together and allows us to amend or update what happens in that team and also to introduce new things too.

[Becky Mueller]

@Andy Gladstone @Amanda Barber @Fotios Kantzos @Roberto Garzon @Roy Oscar Love your responses! The desire to better define roles and responsibilities seems to be the theme within lots of teams. Please keep us posted if you end up running this play, and let us know how it goes!

[John D Patton]

We have used several of the team plays - But the roles and responsibilities play is our favorite the way we use it is: each team member has their own confluence page with a simple page properties macro acting as an "about me" page. We use to build team pages with page property reports all over Confluence - all a team member has to do is maintain that outline and all of the functions that member contributes to the team are automatically updated everywhere. Using Plays and Confluence marco's together allows us to amend or update what happens in that team and also helps introduce new members to the process and culture.

[Becky Mueller]

Wow, love it @John D Patton ! That's a really interesting use of the page properties macro. Thank you for sharing!

[Dean Vincent]

It so easy for team to be focused on their work that they forget to network with other teams and foster those relationships that will ultimately means they can deliver just that little be more.

Great idea in all four plays

[LeAnne Ganucheau]

I’m looking forward to applying the team poster to our budding team of project managers, product managers, and operations specialists. We have a few new roles in our department as well as facing the newness of a re-organization so this will help us to streamline all of our goals and responsibilities, providing clarity for each distinct role.

[Aaron G]

I'm looking forward to implementing this system as we begin new projects and assemble teams to execute on them. This looks like a much more efficient way to identify potential team members for those projects, and streamline the onboarding process.

[Tracy Maxwell]

My team will benefit from creating the Team Poster and defining and sharing our roles and responsibilities. We are a new hybrid team of 4 and some team members skill sets overlap, so these activities will be very helpful.

[Jordan Garn]

The Team Playbook will help our team as we transition from server to cloud over the next few months. A few roles and responsibilities have changed and shifted since our server version was initially launched at the end of 2019. We will most likely use all the playbooks in one form or another to foster more communication and engagement across multiple teams and departments.

[Ziyad ur Rehman]

We are team of 5 members and due individual responsibilities the systems we have are dysfunctional and required a strong team bonding throughout the site and working environment. 

[Craig Oliver]

Identifying and separating roles and responsibilities is crucial. This allows the roles and responsibility to be  separate from the skills held by a particular individual and will allow for the ability of teams to scale and grow.

[Patrick McCaffrey]

Our fiber-optic internet and television service (being a relatively small team by comparison with our competitors) benefits greatly from the interpersonal engagement with our customers; however, we are not without our faults. Two of the more applicable team-play items, communication and definition of roles, would better help to push our company into further success.

[Aida Amerbakieva]

During the course of my previous project, we encountered a series of challenges stemming from ambiguous roles and responsibilities at the outset. Subsequently, two additional team members were incorporated during a later stage of the project. Establishing clear roles and responsibilities at the project's initiation and maintaining these definitions throughout the project's lifecycle could have mitigated any delays and misunderstandings among the team.

[Van]

After going through the material I believe the best play for my team is working on the Responsibilities and Roles. This will help us all be more efficient rather than stepping on each others toes trying to do everything because we are a smaller team. 

[Venkatesh Ramesh]

After running wonderful, informative chapters/course, would love to introduce the Team poster first. Never knew, this could be beneficial and the team would love this idea. Though, other practice are partially available, never thought about having a Team poster! 

[Damien Versluis]

We're currently assessing our existing hybrid work model.

Having greater clarity on the roles/responsibilities of our teams and a greater understanding and appreciation of our team members self-assessed "how I like to work" details shared would provide some really great benefits for the company as a whole.

I think the Team Poster details will offer great benefits as will running the working agreements play.

[Andreas]

We currently want to improve our team collaboration so the team poster play and working agreement will be good to start from, it will remind us why we are here and why we work together to pursue the same goal and growth together, by implementing the team poster and working agreement we will know about our goal and the reason we work together more clearly and also we can set good agreement how we can work together and how we can improve our collaboration day by day.

[Dana A.]

The Team Poster and Roles and Responsibilities plays would be great for our team as we have gained new team members and are going through a period of changes in terms of focus and responsibilities. Having a solid document to refer to that can be updated will help us create a shared understanding and spell out the motivations and problems that we need to zoom in on vs. unimportant tasks, as well as identify any gaps -- responsibilities that are not claimed by any existing role.

[Arjuna Saenz]

Hello everyone. I've been working as a project manager for many years and it's great when new tools, strategies, frameworks coming out from different sources to help the community to be more efficient.  I think one of the hardest moments I've faced during my career was assigning roles. I think we, as project managers, need to be more creative and curious when we try to lead a team. Those techniques are gonna be helpful. 

[Jackeline Argüello]

We are going through a reorganization . We can apply all of them to start with the right foot. We have done a version of them in the past, but this order gives more coherence and structure to the conversations.