How to Get Your Team on the Same Page, Fast
Using the Team Canvas to align small teams, on-site or remotely.
TL;DR: Great teams are not born, they grow into effective and cohesive groups of dedicated and inspired people over time. There are ways to facilitate this growth. The Team Canvas is a free tool for leaders, facilitators, and consultants that helps to organize team alignment meetings, bring members on the same page, resolve conflicts and build a productive culture. It’s good for on-sites and remote sessions. Download it here in one of ten languages.
Part 1. Understanding Team Dynamics
As a leader or facilitator, you might experience moments when you need to bring the team members together, clarify their goals, figure out their motivations, and help them to be more aligned and productive.
Since it’s fairly hard to align teams, it’s good to understand what creates this tension and how to resolve it.
How Teams Mature Over Time
Research suggests that any group tends to go through four stages of development, much like human beings themselves.
- A group starts with the Forming stage, when everybody in the group craves for inclusion and doesn’t raise any concerns, just like children do with their parents.
- As the group develops, the teenage-like Storming stage occurs, along with conflicts and interdependence.
- As the group goes further, it gets to the young adult-like Norming stage, when members start to learn to work together effectively.
- When things are finally figured out, the group gets to the Performing stage and works effectively and smoothly like a mature grown-up.
Two most likely problems occur along the way:
- Groups get stuck between the first two stages, not being able to develop further (especially at the Storming stage);
- Groups don’t have enough time or focused effort to resolve conflicts and develop into high-performance teams organically.
Defining Great Team Culture
Based on our experience and research on company cultures, we identified the key components of self-leading teams that tend to have a) sustainable creative culture and b) high-performance standards. Summing up in three words, it is a mix of purpose, openness, and mastery. Here is a bit more elaborate picture:
By identifying these areas, we could put them into practice via a series of hands-on workshops with teams of 2 to 8 people. After each workshop, we collected group feedback, which allowed us to iterate on the framework. We called it The Team Canvas.
The Team Canvas helps to start a structured conversation with the team and to bring everyone on the same page. Groups that went through The Team Canvas sessions consistently reported higher clarity and alignment, with less friction and conflict. In the long run, The Team Canvas can help to shape the team culture at your company or collective.
Part 2. How to Use The Team Canvas
Who Is The Team Canvas For
Trusted by practitioners from hundreds of companies like IDEO, Hyper Island, BBC, Cisco, Deutsche Bahn, and many others, The Team Canvas is best suited for:
- Team Leads. They can rely on a structured set of topics to achieve a much-needed state of alignment.
- Facilitators. Made by facilitators for facilitators, The Team Canvas helps to create a shared context and let everyone in the group be proactive and driven. At the end of the day, we all want our work to be more fun and collaborative.
- Educators. When success as an educator is determined by how well their students get along while absorbing knowledge and working on projects together, The Team Canvas can help educators to create stronger connections among the students.
Choosing Your Setup
Here are a few options for how people use The Team Canvas.
- Run an on-site team meeting. Keep reading this section to facilitate an internal meeting with your team.
- Run an Online Team Canvas session. For remote teams, we recommend using one of the collaborative brainstorming tools to run The Team Canvas session with the whole team, along with a Skype/Google hangouts call. A couple of whiteboarding tools we enjoy the most:
The Team Canvas in a Nutshell
The Team Canvas comes in two flavors:
- The Team Canvas Basic is a simple template to kick-off a team project, adjust its course and ensure the team has enough momentum to get things done smoothly. It takes about 25–30 minutes to finish.
- The Team Canvas Complete is used to facilitate an alignment session to get everyone in the team on the same page about goals, aspirations, needs, and rules. It has a great capacity to gently resolve conflicts and takes 1.5 to 2 hours to complete.
Part 3. The Complete Guide to Facilitating a Team Canvas Session
Making team members click is a matter of time, shared values, complementary skills, and mutual trust. Can you accelerate the process? I bet you can. Follow these elaborate instructions to facilitate a team alignment session.
1. The Guide for The Team Canvas (Complete)
2. The Guide for The Team Canvas Basic
Part 4. Making Sense of the Results and Following Up
Once the Team Canvas is complete, it is a good practice to collect results from post-its (or virtual sticky notes) into a centralized document. In most cases, a shared Google Doc with a summary of responses would work.
- In some cases, for experienced and certified practitioners, we suggest creating a report with recommendations on the group behaviors that the practitioners saw, and with the changes that they suggest.
The next thing for the leader or facilitator is to remind the team about the rules and activities and make sure they get implemented over time.
After 4–6 weeks, we suggest organizing a follow-up session with the same team to chat about the change that they observe in the group dynamics and individual behaviors.
The Team Canvas was created by Alex Ivanov with the contribution from Dmitry Voloschuk, Ross Sokolovsky, and many facilitators who helped us bring this to life and bounce off our ideas.
The Team Canvas is free and is distributed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Feel free to use or share.
For any questions, reach out via The Team Canvas website.
