Week 3: YouMap® Team Building
So far, I’ve completed one group coaching and spent last week doing one-on-one sessions for YouMap®. Now, the goal of the 2nd group coaching is to get participants to learn about the strengths of their peers and work collaboratively to emulate an actual productive work experience.
Similar to how I approached week 1, I completed some prep work during the weekday leading up to 2nd group coaching by:
- Modifying the first slide deck to add new group activities
- Creating a summary of my findings from the YouMap® reports
- Sourcing out the appropriate activities through Gallup’s resource portal and downloading the worksheets.
Once I had those action items completed, I was ready to launch the zoom meeting!
I began with a quick recap of the Four Pillars of YouMap®:
- Strengths — A person’s natural inherited talents (not skills)
- Values — What a person deems most important to them
- Skills — Competencies a person has developed (not to be confused with strengths)
- How I’m Wired — Personality-based interests
Given this session’s theme on team building, I shared some of the patterns I saw among the group’s YouMap® report, following the four pillars:
Strengths distribution among the group
I pulled up the slide below and before revealing my findings I asked participants: “what do yall notice?”
They immediately saw that Futuristic was the most common strength among the group, then I added my own findings, which I share below:
- Thinking Themes were overall dominant
- Relating Themes — 2nd most dominant
- Executing Themes — 3rd most dominant
- Influencing themes — least dominant
- And a fun fact: Everyone in the group (including me) shared at least one strength in common with another member!
That last bit was very significant because it implies that in addition to being unique, we still have things in common, bringing us closer to each other!
Values Cloud
I aggregated the groups’ values in a word cloud format because I thought it would be more visually appealing this way. Here is a screenshot of it below:
Once I had the image up, participants readily noticed that “freedom” stood the most and — yes you’ve guessed it — because, it turns out everyone in the group (including me) had “freedom” listed as one of their values!
It was also cool to see that the second most common value was growth (shared among 4 group members), followed by: community, competency, leadership, meaningful work, success, and wisdom!
Skills pie
For this section, I thought it best to showcase using a pie chart to illustrate the distributions.
The skills data was also the hardest for me to summarize. While I saw that the most common preferred skills were in the leadership category, it wasn’t always accurate all across the board. For example, Don doesn’t enjoy leading others nor motivating them. But he likes to initiate change — because he has futuristic — and he likes to mentor, most likely because he has relator, which allows him to build genuine relationships with others. Whereas Parker likes ALL 4 of those leadership skills due in part because he has self-assurance, and people with self-assurance feel confident in their ability to take risks and manage their own lives. They also got an inner compass that gives them certainty in their decisions.
Meanwhile, the most common least preferred skills turned out to be technical and mechanical. But then, when broken down on a one-one basis, some participants’ least preferred skills did not fit the pie chart’s mold. So, my only conclusion now is that this skills distribution is relative to the strengths and individual YouMap® insight!
Career Interest Type
As a reminder, Holland’s six core occupation interest types explain that our personality determines our motivations and preferences at work. So, people are motivated in six different ways: to do, to think, to create, to help, to persuade, and to organize! See below:
Remember how the groups’ values cloud showed “freedom,’’ as the all All 6 career types are represented in this group — with two participants, Ade & Noah, who share the same career interest type: The regulator.
So, right away I went and made a comparative table and shared it with the group as well. See below:
Group Activities
Once I shared all my findings, I moved on to the team building activities. Here, I’ll focus on one activity that participant found the most valuable: the “Performance Goal Plan Activity”
The purpose of this activity is to help the team brainstorm ideas about using their strengths at work to achieve a performance goal. Before the start of this session, I intentionally paired up Parker & Don then Edwin & Noah together for a 10 mins breakout session.
I had also shared the activity worksheet with them prior via email with instructions to review the list of tasks to determine which team member(s) would be best suited for each task by having each team member consider:
- Which task do you enjoy?
- Which task are you good at?
- Which strengths could you use to complete which tasks?
After a 10 mins breakout sessions, I had participant share their insights, starting with Parker & Don who were task to coordinate sales efforts with marketing programs and deliver sales presentations to a range of prospective clients:
- Parker: “The first task was creating the leads list of the clients. We handed that one over to Don because he has deliberative and intellection.”
- Then Don took over and said “we also had to prepare the presentation. I took that one again for my deliberativeness. I’m very particular about how things go”
- To further illustrate the connection between his strengths and the task assigned to him, Don also added “I am working on a presentation right now. And I noticed the font size was different by just one increment. And so I pick things like that.”
- And that’s when Parker came back to add the finishing touches saying: “I got assigned to deliver the presentation because of my self-assurance”
In nutshell, this dialogue shows what happens when people are allowed to cater to their strengths in a group setting. Let’s take a look at what Edwin & Noah had to say for their team assignment — Formulate a strategic and operational objective, build-out automation on hub spot, and present them to the team on zoom:
- Edwin: “When it comes to formulating strategic operational objectives, we basically agreed that I’ll be the best for that because of my strength, being strategic in general. And I think analytical would also back that up, when it comes to getting all the finer details and putting them together in you know, and packaging it together, together into one plan or objective.
- Then Noah said: “for building out automations on HubSpot, we decided that collaboration would be the best for both of us. I would use my restorative strength and he would use his deliberative.”
- That’s when Edwin took over to explain how his deliberative would play “minimize risks and get the automation built out the best way possible.”
- Noah also added “my strength [restorative], recognizing where the problems are and what needs to be fixed in the automation, and how to best go about that…And for the presentation to the team on zoom, that’s on me. I would use my woo factor, adaptability, and includer in one!
Hearing this exchange, In addition to the one before this, I knew that I reached my goal for this week; participants really got to appreciate not just their strengths but also understand how their partner showed up, assigned each task accordingly, and then worked collaboratively. Now imagine a workplace like that! How awesome would that be!?
What I learned so far…
For this session, I had two participants cancel on me last minute 😅 which messed up the pairs I made in advance right alongside their given activity 😭. Then and there, I had to pivot on the go and restructure the performance goal activity. One thing that worked in my favor was that the even number of 4 people left on the call, whose strengths happen to be very complementary. But then that left me with another hick-up: breakout sessions. I had no idea how to implement one. But hey, I wasn’t alone on this call, so I asked my peers who guided me graciously through the process, laughing all along 😂
Next Steps:
With the 2nd group session completed, all I had to do now was complete the one-one summaries for participants on Notion and have them book their final 1:1 with me! Stay tuned for the final week 4!
