182 | HR Team Building: An Activity Every New HR Leader Should Try

Today I'm sharing one of my favorite team building activities with you.

It's an activity that I think can be especially helpful if you're a new HR leader who wants to help your team to bond, to build trust, to understand each other, and to find ways of working really well together.

I know that when you take over the leadership of an HR team, it's tempting to get stuck straight into the big things like developing a new people strategy or creating a team charter or making changes to how the HR function operates.

But if you move too quickly without first investing in the relationships across the team, those things can just be so much harder to achieve and you might end up finding that people don't really get behind your plans.

They might continue working in silos if that's already happening instead of sharing ideas and information.

And you could even risk losing good people who just don't feel bought into the direction that things are taking.

Because ultimately teams are made up of people, including you as the leader.

And we all bring different strengths, experiences, preferences and ways of working.

So taking some time to get to know and understand each other and build that all important trust, it gives you a much stronger foundation for everything you want to achieve together.

And the activity that I'm sharing today is a really simple way to start doing that.

It involves everyone creating and sharing their own personal Personal User Manual.

The name personal user manual comes from a familiar idea.

So when you buy a new piece of equipment or a machine, it usually comes with a set of instructions, sometimes called a user manual, telling you how it works and how to use it.

But of course, people don't, and we're far more complicated than any machine.

We don't have instructions and without them we're left out to figure out, just through experience, how best to work with each other and through guesswork.

So creating a personal user manual for each person in your team, including you, gives you the opportunity for everyone to create their own set of instructions explaining how they work best, what their colleagues should know about them, what helps them thrive, and how other people can work successfully with them.

In this episode, I'll give you some ideas of what to include in your personal user manuals, and I'll talk you through how to run the activity with your own own HR team.

I've also created a free personal user manual template that you can download and adapt@brightskyhr.co.uk resources.

You'll find that link in the show notes and the YouTube description as well.

Welcome to HR Coffee Time, the podcast designed to help you have a Successful and fulfilling HR career.

I'm your host, Faye Wallace.

Let's get started.

Before I explain how to run the activity, I think it's worth just quickly looking at why it can be so useful.

We can work alongside people for a really long time without necessarily understanding that much about how they work best.

You might not know that one of your colleagues needs time to think before they then feel that they can share their view.

You might not realise that someone really values regular feedback.

Or you may have no idea that someone has a particular strength or area of expertise that could be incredibly useful to the rest of the team.

It's also very easy to misinterpret differences in the way that we work.

Perhaps someone becomes quiet when they're under pressure and other people assume that they're annoyed.

Or one person loves picking up the phone to talk something through.

Like me.

I quite like that.

While somebody else on the team finds unexpected calls really distracting and they would much rather receive a message.

Message first.

Neither of those approaches is right or wrong, they're just different.

And personal user manuals help make some of that invisible information visible.

They give everyone an opportunity to say, this is how I tend to work best, this is a strength I bring, this is what helps me.

Or this is something that you might notice about me.

And they can also help you to start building psychological safety within the team.

Meaning that it helps people to feel safe enough to speak up, to ask a question, share an idea, admit a mistake, or respectfully disagree without worrying about some sort of negative consequence happening.

And of course I know that one activity isn't going to create perfect psychological safety on its own.

That's going to come from how you all behave towards each other over time.

But this can be a really helpful starting point.

So hopefully you can see why getting some of this information out into the open can be so incredibly helpful.

The next thing to think about is what you actually want everyone to include in their personal user manuals.

You definitely don't need a huge list of categories for people to fill in.

In fact, I think a smaller number of thoughtful ones is much more useful than creating something that feels like a huge piece of homework and no one's going to want to fill in.

So some useful sections could be things like how I like to communicate.

And as an example, they might want to talk about do they prefer a teams message or an email or a phone call?

Do they like plenty of context or would they rather people get straight to the point?

Another category could be how I like to receive feedback.

Do they appreciate direct, constructive feedback?

Or do they find it helpful to have their good work acknowledged at the same time so they're not just having something that might feel harsh received?

Would they rather receive feedback verbally or in writing, or both so they've got time to digest it?

Another section could be my strengths and the things I can help with.

This can be incredibly useful because there is often knowledge and expertise within a team, or confidence about something within a team that other people simply don't know about.

You could also include what gives me energy at work, what drains my energy, the conditions that help me to do my best work, what you might notice about me when I'm under pressure, projects or career development opportunities that I'd like to be involved in.

And I always think it's nice to have an optional section about life and interests outside of work.

It can be fascinating and really lovely to see what people discover about each other when that section's included and they suddenly discover within the group there are shared interests and experiences that they had no idea they had in common.

Another section that I've included when I facilitated this activity for a people team was I think we can be more impactful as a group by so I know that this moves slightly beyond the idea of a traditional personal user manual, but I think it just creates a great opportunity for everyone to be able to contribute ideas about how the team can become even stronger with the way that they work together.

And I think it's really important to point out that you don't have to come up with all these categories and decide on them by yourself.

What can be incredibly helpful is to actually ask everyone in the team what they think should be included within that personal user manual template.

What information do they think would be really helpful for everyone to be sharing with each other?

And so this is something that you can discuss at any point, but hopefully if you are a new HR leader, you'll have been having or you'll be about to have one to one meetings with each of your team members and as part of that meeting you could talk to them about this idea of personal user manuals and and just ask them to have a think about what categories they think would be useful to include.

And then you can adapt my free template using their suggestions alongside any other categories that you think would be really helpful to have in there.

So once everyone's completed their personal user manual, the really important part begins which is sharing them with each other.

Because the document itself is any part of the activity, a huge amount of the value comes from the conversations that you have when everyone shares what they've written.

And before you start, instead of just diving straight into everyone reading out their personal user manuals, I'd really recommend having a little bit of time at the end of the session to talk about as a group, what everyone needs to be able to feel they can contribute and get the most from the session.

So the team might suggest things like listening without interrupting, being curious rather than being judgmental, and respecting the fact that nobody has to share anything that they don't feel comfortable sharing.

That last point is really important because of course, the activity is about creating greater trust and understanding.

It isn't about forcing people to be vulnerable if they don't feel comfortable doing that.

I'd also highly recommend that you, as the leader, go first.

You could even share your completed personal user manual before the session so everyone can see what one looks like when it's completed and the sort of things that you've chosen to include.

But more importantly, going first gives you the opportunity to role model the openness that you're asking from everybody else.

Remember, you're part of that team too, and they'll all be looking to you.

And then, one at a time, each person when you're doing this group session is going to talk through their personal user manual, while everyone else has got a copy of it in front of them to follow along with.

When each person finishes, then you, as the leader, can invite positive comments and reflections from everyone else.

So you might ask, what did you learn that is going to help you work together better?

Or was there anything that they shared that reinforces something you already really value about working with them, or what was interesting for you that you didn't know before?

So you might hear people say things like, I hadn't realised that you prefer having time to think before being asked for your view.

That's really useful for me to know.

I'm going to try to make sure I give you more time to think things through.

Or you mentioned that staying calm under pressure is one of your strengths, and that's definitely something I really value about working with you.

It helps me feel calm as well.

Or perhaps they'll say, I didn't know that you had that experience from your previous role.

I can already think of something that I'd love your input on.

The idea isn't for everyone to analyze or critique each other.

It's an opportunity to help each person feel heard, to reinforce their strengths and to deepen everyone's understanding of each other.

So once everyone has had their turn, I still wouldn't finish the activity there.

Instead, bring the conversation back to the team as a whole and you can ask some questions like what have we learned about ourselves as a team?

What could help us work even better together as a team?

And what would we like to do differently as a result of today?

Perhaps you discover that several people would value more feedback, or maybe they want to have more regular team meetings or have them in a particular format.

Perhaps there's expertise sitting in one part of the team that others could make much more use of, or something you've learned could feed into a team charter that you create together afterwards.

That's where the activity starts to make a practical difference to how you work together by leading onto all those other things.

But finally, think about how you're going to keep the learning alive.

You could revisit the personal user manuals in six months.

You could update them once a year or use them again whenever somebody new joins the team.

So if you're stepping into a new HR leadership role and you want to help your team bond, build trust, understand each other, and work really well together, I think this can just be such a brilliant activity to try and you definitely don't need to be a new HR leader to use it.

It can work really well as part of any team building or team development day, and it can be particularly useful for remote or hybrid teams who don't spend much time together in person.

The main thing I'd like you to remember is that the real value isn't the personal user manual itself, it's the conversations and the greater understanding that it creates.

So remember to adapt the categories in your personal user manual template so that they're really genuinely useful for you and your particular team role model the openness you want to see yourself and make sure you finish by talking about what you've learned collectively as a team and what you want to do differently as a team as a result.

And remember, if you'd like some help getting started, I've created that free personal user manual template for you to use and adapt with your own team.

Just head over to brightskyhr.co.uk resources to download it.

And if you know another HR leader who has recently taken over a team, or someone who is planning a team building day and looking for a great activity to use, please do share this episode with them.

I hope that it helps them as well.

If you've enjoyed today's episode and you're watching it on YouTube, I would be so grateful if you give the video a like like or leave me a comment underneath the video.

It's always so nice to see those likes and comments and know that you're finding this helpful.

It really helps me to keep going with it.

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That is such a great signal to the podcast apple to encourage them to recommend the podcast to other people too.

And I just love this free HR coffee time podcast to reach and help as many HR professionals as it can.

Thank you so much and I'm looking forward to being back again in two weeks time with the next episode for you.