Activity Overview

This is a necessary activity designed to help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose). Defining these two things will help any team to be more focused and aligned. With the support of tangible examples from other companies, the team members work as individuals and a group to systemize the way they work together. The goal is a visual manifestation of both the purpose and culture that can be put up in the team’s workspace.

Objective

• To help teams define their purpose (why they exist) and their culture (how they work together to achieve that purpose)

Running this activity online

• Pick an online whiteboard tool that allows using a large, zoomable canvas.
• Set up each topic at a different area of the board, spread them out just like you would do it on the walls of a room.
• Invite participants to zoom in and visit each section and add their ideas as sticky notes once you reach that section of the exercise.
• If you’re not using an online whiteboard, we’d recommend using a collaboration tool such as Google Docs to collect the information for each step under a separate heading. Invite everyone into the document but be very clear in regards to editing rights.
• Procreate your screen deck and screen share this with your participants through your video conferencing software. We also recommend sharing this so participants can go through the deck again during the reflection steps.
• When facilitating group discussion, we recommend that participants use non-verbal means to indicate they would like to speak. You can use tools like Zoom’s nonverbal feedback tools, a reaction emoji, or just have people put their hands up. The facilitator can then invite that person to talk.

Materials Needed

• Screen
• Projector
• Sticky notes
• Markers
• Whiteboard
• A/4 sheets

Step By Step Procedures

This activity is split into two separate parts, purpose and culture. Both are important to define for any team. This can be utilized to generate from scratch or re-energize an existing purpose and/or culture. Use this activity to formulate a common purpose and stated cultural norms in a team.

The purpose is the reason why your team exists. Why it was formed. Why it’s needed in the organization.

Culture is how your team coordinates and works together. How you get the job done. And the values, norms, and behaviors that are expected.

1. Start off the activity by asking your team participants to reflect on these questions:

   What is our job as a team?
   What’s our goal? How do we know when we’ve done our job?
   What benefit are we bringing to the company and the world?
   
   Ask them to share general thoughts.

2. This step utilizes the knowledge of the participants to develop a broad idea of how your team’s purpose might be defined. First, share some examples of company purposes and also consider bringing in your favorite examples from within your company. Attach them up on the wall so they are visible to team members. Here are some examples: 

   Amazon – The Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
   Facebook – To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
   Google – To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

   Now ask each participant to write down their version of their team’s purpose.

3. This step entails combining these individually written purposes to make one for the whole team. It is always challenging to go from multiple opinions to a collective opinion, and this step will require some patience. The best thing you can do here is to provide constraints. It is best to incorporate a 20×20 rule for group decision making. Give them no more than 20 minutes to craft a collective team purpose with no more than 20 words.

   Don’t shy away from word-smithing and finessing the language, words are important: words shape worlds. Make sure you give them 10, 5, and 2-minute warnings before their time is up. Often a group will arrive at a collective purpose before the end of the time. You’ll feel the vibe change in the room when that happens. If so, stop them and move onto the next step. 

4. Now you have a collective team purpose. In the next few steps, you’ll follow a similar process to derive the team culture.

   Culture is how your team works together. It’s often hard to pin down and define in words, but it’s easy to feel and experience. Culture is expressed in the way that people talk to each other, the way that work is assigned and completed, the way that the CEO treats the cleaners. Just like purpose, share some examples of famous company cultures.  

   Now give the team sticky notes and markers and ask them to write down words that represent the best of their team culture – these can be aspirational or actual – as many as they like, one per sticky note.

   After 5-10 minutes of writing down, ask participants to lay the notes down in front of them on the table, wall, or floor. Give them 1 minute to remove the bad half of the sticky notes leaving them with just the good half. Do the same again but ask them to keep only the three most important elements of their team culture.

5. Ask the team to post up their notes on the wall. As a group, cluster the words that have a similar meaning or feeling behind them. This step can be quite discursive. As the facilitator, it’s your job to recognize when the group is off track and bring them round to making a decision.
   When the clustering is finished, ask if there’s anything missing for the team. Did they get rid of any cultural elements that they think should be up? If so, get them up there.
6. Now you have a draft of your team culture. These words or statements only work if they are brought to life.  You need to explain each one – define what the behavior looks like when it is being met, and what it looks like when it isn’t. For example:

   TRANSPARENCY

   We do work in the open, using collaborative documents that anyone can access and having conversations in open channels that anyone can join. We are not secretive, we don’t talk behind each other’s back, and we don’t work in isolation. Either do this collaboratively as a group or assign culture statements to each person to write.

7. Congratulations, you have articulated your purpose and culture! Now make huge versions of them and ensure they are visible in your team workspace. Revisit this work in 1 month. It’s should be a living document that shifts and changes as your team changes.

   Facilitator’s notes: Even if you’re a remote team you should still make your purpose and culture visible. Do this in whatever way suits your working process.