Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Here is a simple exercise you can use with your team to learn something about how well you work together.

Step 1: Get a deck of playing cards.

Step 2: Hand every person on your team some cards. Hand some person a couple of cards and hand some persons a dozen cards.

Step 3: Tell everyone they need X cards where X = 52 cards/number of persons in your team.

Now we have a situation where some persons have too many cards while some persons have too few cards. Sound like a familiar situation at work?

Step 4: Tell everyone to come to you when they all have X cards.

Step 5: Observe.

Step 6: When everyone has come to you with X cards, gather them and have a conversation.

Questions:

• How do you feel?
• How did you do this?
• How would you do it if you had to do it again?
• What did you learn?
• Who did you learn?
• What else do you want to say?

Why would anyone do this? To learn how your team works together and how they communicate. And how they shuffle the workload when some persons have too little to do and others have too much to do.