The "One Thing" Team Building Exercise

A company is only as strong as its management team.

So how do you strengthen your management team?

How do you inspire your team to improve, and how do you keep each other accountable for making these improvements?

Try the “One Thing” exercise.

I do this exercise with all teams that adopt the Long Game Operating System.

Here’s how it works.

The Exercise

This exercise comes from Patrick Lencioni’s phenomenal book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

The point of the exercise is to build trust, share appreciation, and invite each other to be better.

One by one, you are going to tell each other one piece of positive feedback, and one piece of critical feedback.

To kick off, ask if anyone wants to volunteer to go first. If no one steps forward, the CEO goes first.

For this person, and every other member of the team after that, do the following:

Ask the person in the hot seat if the team has their permission to be completely open and honest.

It may seem trivial, but this really helps to keep people in an open, learning mindset.

Have everyone write down two things for the person in the hot seat:

One piece of positive feedback, the most positive thing they bring to the team
One piece of constructive feedback: the one thing they should start or stop doing for the greater good of the team and/or company

Next, it’s time to share the feedback.

Throughout this part, the person getting feedback is not allowed to defend, discuss or debate.

But they can ask clarifying questions at the end of each round of feedback.

Go around the table and share all the positive feedback first.

Tell them in a direct way, e.g. “The thing I admire about YOU…”.

Then, go around the table and share the constructive feedback, again addressing the person directly.

Do this for each person in the team.

This is already an extremely powerful exercise.

But here’s how you take it over the top:

End the session by having each person on the team pick one thing from the constructive feedback, and repeat it in this format:

“In the coming year, I commit to start/stop ….”

Every quarterly review, check in to see how everyone is doing on their commitment.

Are they better, the same, or worse?

The goal is to have everyone reach “better” at next year’s Annual Meeting.

And by then, you’ll have plenty of new input to do the exercise again.