#Teams365 #1372: Virtual and Remote Team Development: #3 - Vision

Time: 10 – 60 minutes

Materials Needed: Pens, Paper, Markers

Instructions:
Having a shared vision is one of the six ingredients teams need to excel. Check out past posts on the Six Factors here. Depending on the pace of your business context, you may have team members consider their immediate vision, or a vision of a medium or long term process. Vision work takes teams into the realm of possibility, and research has shown that it activates the PEA – Positive Emotional Attractor network, literally “opening up the brain”. Read more about Boyatzis research in Neuroscience and Leadership here.

Ask team members to think about what their vision is for the next year/3 years/five years etc. This activity can be facilitated many ways. Some teams like prompting questions, whereas other teams like to jump right into the activity with no prompts or questions to think about.
You might have:

1. Teams sketch out a vision of what they think their future will look like
2. Provide teams with scrap book materials and have them work on

 
Prompting questions around vision. It can be useful to provide teams with a number of questions around vision. Check out other posts here at the Teams365 blog for more on this. 8 the prompting questions you may provide to teams are:
___ years from now we are…..
Our greatest successes have been…
We are known for …
The impact our work has had is….
Key stakeholders we work with are….
Other teams come to us for….
Every day we really enjoy…..
_____ has helped us be successful
 
It is always very interesting to see where teams take this activity. Spend time after the actual vision is created (in drawing, on paper) by getting  the team to notice:
Key themes which have emerged
Key metaphors which have emerged
Next steps which are obvious
What they notice about roles
Invite the team to place their newly created vision somewhere visible where they can refer to it on a regular basis.
 You may follow up on this activity with a later date in having them further refine their vision or add to it in another way. So if you had people sketch in the first iteration, the next round might be having them identify some key photos which represent different milestones in the vision.

I have written quite a bit around vision in past posts – be sure to check out other Teams365 posts on this topic here.
 

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats.
Follow us on Twitter @Teams365
Phone: (416)996-8326

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