Team Player Cards: helping build psychological safety in teams

Recently I’ve been exploring ways of building psychological safety in teams. There’s one experiment in particular that has created a bit of interest which involves the creation of a Team Player Card.

A team player card, which is my evolution on the user manual, essentially aims to help people better understand how to work with each other. It attempts to make those implicit assumptions and perceptions we form about our work colleagues more explicit. It helps to overcome the ‘…I wish I knew that about you when we started working together…’ conversation. Typical information found in the user manual includes insights into people’s leadership style, strengths and how they like to communicate.

Whilst these areas generate useful insights about people, where I see the real value lying in something like a team player card is in the questions that guide people to dig a little deeper and surface vulnerability, an area traditionally seen as a weakness and therefore rarely discussed in the work environment. Sections like ‘how to help me’ and ‘what people often misunderstand about me’ not only force people to reflect on their own behaviours but also make them explicit.

Why evolve the User Manual?

There’s no arguing that the intent of the User Manual is pure in that it encourages and enriches conversations with people. There were three reasons why I wanted to evolve the User Manual:

• Language is important — the term ‘user manual’ never really resonated with me and evokes themes around individualisation, tradition and structure. Considering the intent is about building trust and rapport with others, I thought I’d experiment with softer language that focuses on the team rather than the individual.

• Visual design similar to footy cards — I was pretty underwhelmed with the visual design of people’s user manuals, so I had a stab at designing the team player card as a one pager, similar to that of your footy cards where you have a photo and key details of the players making them more consistent, accessible and attractive, in the hope that people within teams would swap their player cards around and share their stories.

• Included new inputs — I’ve experimented with adding other outputs from self-assessment activities into the Team Player Card, namely the Meyers Briggs results as well as my ‘why’ (inspired by Simon Sinek’s ‘Finding your why’ guide book).

What I learnt from creating my Team Player Card

In order to truly empathise with others who would create their own team player cards, I thought it necessary for me to go through this process and create my own. And so I did. Over a period of two weeks, I created my Team Player Card which, if I had to summarise my feelings about the whole end to end process, it would be cathartic, challenging and assuring.

Upon reflection, there are three things that I learnt from creating my Team Player Card:

1. It guides self-reflection — the whole process forced me to think much deeper about me as a person and my not-so-discussed quirks, my style as well as my vulnerabilities. It meant that I was open to receiving feedback about myself from others, some of which reinforced my perceptions of myself while some of it was conflicting. It also allowed me to consolidate a number of self-assessments (e.g. Meyers Briggs, Gallup Strengths Assessment) that I had completed over the years into one concise snapshot

2. It helps others around you — over the past month, I’ve been deliberate in sharing my Team Player Card with peers and team mates, and the feedback has been met with curiosity and positivity. I recently took a leadership team through a session where they built and shared their cards and the feedback from that session was met with resounding high fives. Comments such as ‘I can’t believe that I’ve been working with you for this long and I only now realise that…’ and ‘you probably hate me because the way that I normally communicate with you is your least preferred communication style…!’

3. It improves the quality of your work life — imagine working where a team’s ‘storming’ phase was non-existent; imagine working in an environment where it didn’t take six months for people to say ‘I finally now feel like I understand you…’; imagine your team knowing you that well that they know what levers to pull to bring the best out of you each day.

The early insights into this experiment is that the people I have tested this with are receptive to the Team Player Card and are generally comfortable with sharing some of their vulnerabilities with others. This gives me enough confidence to continue exploring this concept with a wider audience to help me truly understand whether the Team Player Card concept helps in building psychological safety within teams.