How well do you really know your team? I’m not talking about their favorite place to have lunch or what shows they are currently binging on. Do you really know their strategies, how they problem-solve, how well they work with others? What about yourself? When was the last time you took a step back and reflected on your work? In this quick guide, we will go over strategies to help you get to know your team. This will start you on a path to better connections within your team to promote productivity and overall satisfaction with work.
Let’s start with you
Reflection helps us learn from past experiences and helps us grow, making us better decision-makers. This doesn’t mean to overanalyze every little mistake you’ve ever made. While it is essential to understand our mistakes, we should also reflect on our successes. What made them successful, and how can we apply those strategies to the rest of our work? Self-reflecting gives us a moment to practice self-care to make sure we are taking care of ourselves and our tasks in a healthy way.
When reflecting on mistakes or failures, it is essential not to beat yourself up. You’re human, after all, and we all make mistakes. Believe it or not, we need those failures to grow. How you handle those failures will determine if you can reflect and learn from them. You must acknowledge that mistakes were made, rather than making excuses for the failure, and do your best to turn it around and make it a learning experience. If we constantly blame our surroundings for losses, we can never truly learn from them and will just chalk it up as bad luck. Own it. Learn from it.
Knowing how to reflect on your successes and failures is a great way to get to know yourself better and how you work. Better still, you can bring that knowledge to help benefit your team in the process.
Bring your knowledge of self-reflection to the team
Self-reflection not only helps you become a better worker, but it can significantly benefit your team. Each time you reflect, you are adding priceless knowledge along with the skills you already possess. Sharing that knowledge with others will also help them and give them strategies to reflect on their own work. Apply your lessons learned to keep others from making the same mistakes repeatedly, help them grow, and be willing to take on risks they would otherwise avoid due to lack of experience or intimidation. They can use this new knowledge to make better decisions while navigating uncharted territory.
Ice breakers
Whether you’ve been working with your team for 6 months or 6 years, you’ll be surprised by how much you can learn from them. These icebreaker questions also allow time for your team to reflect on past experiences, what you’ve learned from them, and what you would do in similar situations today. Here is a list of reflective icebreakers:
- Your first job – this is a fun one to reflect on. What did you like, what would you change if you had to go back, and why? Any important lessons you learned here?
- What would you do with a million dollars? – Everyone loves to daydream, but how well can you plan out your future when given a large amount of money? Invest? Travel?
- What do you find the most challenging in your life? – We all have something that we struggle with. It could be minor, could be enormous. Maybe your teammates have the same challenges or have recently overcome their challenges and can help!
- For more fun icebreakers, check out these lists here and here!
Ready to take your team to the next level?
Self-reflection starts with self. Our COBI (Cognitive Orientation Behavior Inventory) Report is an individualized assessment tool. It uses our PCB model to help us understand how we see the world, process information, and behave and make decisions based on it. This assessment is such a fantastic tool to learn how you think and behave. Your team will be able to use this tool, both individually and together, to proactively manage assignments and team tasks and fully utilize your own unique skills and techniques. Take the next step! Click here to learn more.
