Team Building Exercise: Someone is a...

Purpose

This is a suitable exercise for getting people in a team to express their feelings about each other but in a very indirect and controlled way. It also gives delegates a chance to see how others think of them. It also helps them to discover how much they know about other people’s view of them. This exercise is suitable for a group of delegates who know each other.

Objective

Write a statement about others and then guess who wrote each statement.

What You Need

• Blank cards. If you have n delegates, you need n * (n - 1) cards.

Setup

• Place the deck of blank cards at the centre of a table so that everyone can access them as go through the exercise.
• Ask for a volunteer to be the first Target.
• Ask everyone to write a statement on a card for this Target. This statement can be a compliment, a feature, or even a surprising statement. Examples are:
  • Good listener
  • A very charismatic leader
  • Great sense of humour, miss him when he is not around
  • Lovely person, but can have a tidier desk
  • Extreme fan of Lord of the Rings
  • Easy to work with, difficult to be managed by
• Collect these statements and get another volunteer to read them one at a time randomly.
• The Target should guess who wrote that statement. Keep a record of the successful guess as a score. You can write the score on the whiteboard.
• The first successful guess of the Target becomes the next Target.
• Repeat the process and get everyone to write a statement for the new Target.
• Go through the exercise until everyone has played the role of a Target.
• Announce who is the winner based on the highest score.
• Follow with a discussion.

Timing

Explaining the Exercise: 2 minutes

Activity: 20 minutes

Group Feedback: 10 minutes

Discussion

What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about other’s view of you? How good where you in knowing how others think of you?