What have been your Turning Points in 2017?

How to use the Turning Points exercise to improve trust and understanding within your team

It’s easy to get caught in the ‘busyness’ of business as we head into the festive season.

A fab client of mine said this week, “Yes we are certainly feeling the pressure as always at this time of the year. And add a major funding submission deadline of December 20^th – well you can just imagine what impact that’s having on staff.”

To her credit, in amongst this vice-like pressure, she set aside time with her team to sit down and discuss how the year had unfolded.

Obviously this is a smart person, exemplified by her choice to get some independent advice about how she should go about this.

(I say this with complete humility of course…)

Using Turning Points

One of the key activities I recommended within the one-hour timeslot was the Turning Points exercise.

I’ve experienced this myself a couple of times, in a training workshop with facilitation guru Bob Dick and more recently on a webinar (true!) hosted by Andrew Rixon, one of our elite story experts.

The objective of the Turning Points exercise is to improve trust within a team through reflection and safe disclosure.

Here’s an adapted version of the process:

• Get participants to work in pairs (preferred) or triads
• Ask each person to spend time on their own thinking about the year and then list up to three Turning Points for them in their work life over the course of 2017
• Get them to choose one that they’re willing to talk about
• Ask them to clearly and concisely describe their turning point to their colleague/s (no waffling or banging on)
• Then swap with their buddy

Debrief of Turning Points

When the group comes back together, get a snapshot from each pair. Then ask the team for their insights and what they’ve learnt from the exercise.

It’s a powerful process which can reveal the things going on beneath the surface that we may not have been aware of.

Happy to help

Remember to get in touch if you need a hand in designing or facilitating your own review process.