Building Healthy Relationships

What: This activity is designed to help facilitate the team's discussion about building and maintaining healthy working relationships on the team.

Why: People seldom take issue with the tasks that they do day-to-day as part of their jobs. However it is common for teams to struggle with the interpersonal relationships within the team.

When: This is a good teambuilding activity for both new and existing teams. It can also be an effective way to help the team surface and deal productively with issues.

How: Review Effective Team Model( attached) and highlight healthy relationship component.

Ask the team to brainstorm ideas of what the key elements are for healthy relationships. (Optional: Ask: What are some of the words or phrases we would use to describe good relationships?) Note: If they seem stuck, ask them to think of someone you have a really good relationship with and what it is about that person that makes the relationship good. Flipchart responses.

Take the words and phrases that the team brainstormed and have them put some behavioural descriptors around them. For example, "respect", ask the group: What are the behaviours that would help you respect someone? What would they be doing? What would you be seeing? How do you show that you respect someone? What are you doing?

Ask the team to compare the list to their team. Ask the team to identify the barriers to doing this in their team? (i.e. gossiping, lack of time, close quarters, lack of opportunity to teambuild, lack of trust, etc). (Option: Break the team into small groups to do this activity.)

Have the group read over the lists.

Ask the team to assume that there are not unsolvable problems and have them identify some solutions to overcome each of the barriers. (Option: - have groups switch lists and develop solutions for another group's list of barriers).

Prioritize the lists by asking the team to identify the three most important solutions to them and what they are committed to doing when they return to the workplace. They will vote by placing a check mark next to their top three and they can distribute their check marks however they like, (i.e they can pick three items or they can pick one item and put all three check marks there.)

Count up the votes to identify the top three items.

Review them with the team and ask for their commitment to helping the team live out the identified items.

(Option: Individual action planning. Have the members write down two things they are going to do differently in terms of working/communicating with the team as a result of this discussion.)

(Option: The team may use this information to create a set of ground rules for working together.)

Elements of an Effective Team