Knowing the importance of knowing us!

To improve results in the different areas of a company, it is necessary to generate good relationships among all its members. This will bring each of the people closest to the other to help each other.

Something that works to improve relationships is that people know each other, but not only know their names or jobs but also know other aspects of their personal life. It is the leaders’ job to set an example in this regard and help the team in this process.

According to Robbins & Judge (2009), the skills that are necessary for leaders are the “human”, which are those skills that allow people to know, understand and motivate. For this, they must know how to listen or understand the needs, to achieve the objectives.

I share that in my Human Resources team, we had a team member who had just joined. We were working remotely, due to confinement, which meant that we could only interact by phone or video conference. This team member was hired without having personal contact, that is, we did not know each other in person. In addition to this, we had been with the team for some time, without being able to share our issues or simply catch up on each of our projects.

It should be noted that my HR team is made up of 10 people in total and we are part of a company in the service industry with several locations that provide customer service and areas that provide support to these locations.

Because of the situation described, it seemed like an appropriate time to meet the new team member and follow up on the activities or personal issues of the other team members. Then I resorted to one of the Management 3.0 practices that could help me in this mission. The practice is called Personal Maps and you can find information about it at https://management30.com/practice/personal-maps/

The objective of this practice is to get to know each of the people in the team we work with to establish bridges of trust between them and improve collaboration and teamwork.

The dynamic consists of each participant completing the information based on previously defined topics or criteria related to personal aspects, later each one shares the information with the rest of the team.

We had a face-to-face meeting with my team but we had to keep our distance, so we used a collaborative tool (Miro). Through it, I shared a board where each one had to work.

In developing the dynamics we follow the following steps:

Step 1: I explained to each one the objective of the practice. Each participant entered the Miro board, where they had previously been assigned a space with their photo so they know where to work.

Step 2: the workspace had defined the aspects to be completed: home, education, work, hobbies, goals, values, friends, and family. I asked each of them to post the information they would like to share. If they wanted they could stop answering one of the aspects or even increase another.

Step 3: I gave them 10 minutes to do the practice. After that, I asked each of them to share with the whole team what they had placed on their maps.

Step 4: Each participant was given 05 minutes to share their information with the others. While this was happening, any member of the team could ask for additional information that they considered important.

After completing the practice, I can say that as a facilitator I learned that even though we have been working with the same people for a long time, it is likely that they do not know much about their environment. Also, our interests or family environment can change rapidly, especially in these times of constant change that we are living.

The main lessons we learned as a team were:

1. We discovered that the hobbies, family environment, and interests of each team member had changed in recent months.
2. We learned from some difficult situations that some of the team members had gone through and we did not know. This helped us understand and support him as a team.
3. We learned about the needs that each one had and therefore the new concerns.

Based on this experience, my next experiments with this practice will be:

• Define with the participants the criteria or aspects of information that we would like to share.
• Start the activity by asking each member of the team to write what they remember about each of the members.
• After each one finishes sharing their information with the others, I would ask each member of the team to comment on the aspects of each member that most caught their attention that they were unaware of.

It is advisable to consider giving them more time to be able to develop all the practice and make the most of it.

We agreed as a team that the information would remain in a shared file so that everyone could access it. Each area manager was in charge of carrying out the same activity with their work team.

Some achievements that we obtained as a team was discovering aspects that we did not know about each of our colleagues with whom we spent most of the time.

Likewise, we were able to make the process of joining the team of the new member more pleasant.

The team relationships were strengthened, not only with each other but with me as the leader. This I was able to verify in the following weeks when reviewing the progress of the projects and discovering that they had self-organized and solved the inconveniences to carry out the task.

If you have not yet carried out this practice or something similar, do not wait and do it!

Each person’s situation is changing at the speed of changes in the environment, so they will be surprised at the information they can obtain and how they will improve the relationship with their team, between the areas and help each leader to strengthen the confidence of their teams.

So I invite you to be encouraged to carry out this “Personal Maps” practice, taking into account that now more than ever we all need to find spaces for conversation and what better way to do it with the people with whom we spend most of our time, that is, with our work team.