- Time: 2 hours
- Participants: 3-30
- Difficulty: Easy
- Facilitators: 1
Objectives
- Support team building and build trust among team members
- Clarify team goals, key weaknesses and address overall team performance (e.g. when you feel stuck as a team, or when you need to get a lot of stuff done);
- Grow and onboard new team members;
- Align your team members and team leads (recommended every 2-3 months)
When should this session be delivered?
As a leader or facilitator, you experience moments when you need to bring team members together, clarify their goals, figure out their motivations and help them to be more aligned and productive.
Use the Team Canvas to start a structured conversation with the team and bring everyone on the same page. Groups that go through Team Canvas sessions report higher clarity and alignment, with less friction and conflict. You’ll find it especially effective when you want to ask the team to get involved in creating their own success.
In the long run, you’ll likely use and reuse the team canvas template to not only shape the team culture at your company or collective but to also improve it over time. Team canvas works best when it’s a living thing that gets iterated on over time.
Bring it to your team alignment meetings for regular check-ins and introduce the team canvas to new team members to help them get oriented.
Who can facilitate it?
Team leaders and dedicated facilitators are both well positioned to lead a group in creating a team canvas. Team canvas works best as a participatory process that brings team members together around the common goal of team development. As such, you’ll want the team leader present whether they’re facilitating or simply taking part.
There are a few ways you could use team canvas as part of a process of improving overall team performance, whether you’re aiming get your team on the same page, discuss core values or simply include every team member in the process.
A dedicated meeting or workshop is the best way to build a team canvas and invite participants to co-create the culture they want. You can adjust the team canvas template to facilitate it offline with the whole team, or use an online collaboration tool to create it in real-time together.
The team canvas can also serve as an effective tool to kickstart team coaching, helping groups align their personal goals with those of the business. As such, coaches can also benefit from being present at a team canvas session.
Check out the team canvas template details including step-by-step plan with instructions, worksheets, timings, printable schedule and more
Support materials
- Team Canvas Template
Alex is a strategic designer, prototyper and facilitator with 8 years experience in digital and service design. Alex is IDEO alum and Hyper Island graduate. He helped to launch 50+ websites, mobile apps and ad campaigns in various teams, building hands-on knowledge of group development.
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