Teamwork Activities

Teamwork activities work best when all team members attend, because they surface how the team actually functions, and an absent member’s view is the one nobody else can supply. Professionally, showing up for team rituals is the baseline of dependability: teammates plan around your presence, and repeated absences erode the trust these activities are designed to build.

“Always assume positive intent.” (Indra Nooyi)

Identify Individual Learning Objectives and Skills

Team Activity

Each team member creates two lists:

one for motivations and learning objectives, and
another for current strengths and skills.

Prioritize learning objectives and motivations over existing strengths, since there’s time to develop new skills over the course of the project.

Learning goals can extend beyond technical skills to include societal or entrepreneurial interests. Once everyone has their lists, explore ways to complement each other’s strengths and objectives. For instance, one person may teach a skill they excel in to someone who wants to learn it.

Capture a summary of the discussion, including the list of learning objectives, skills, and action items. This conversation is a natural input to your team charter.

A good output is two lists per team member, motivations and learning objectives alongside current strengths, compared as a team to find the gaps and the overlaps.

Regular Stand-Up Meetings

Team Activity Recommended

Stand-up meetings help keep the team aligned by discussing recent progress, identifying challenges, and setting short-term goals.

Hold stand-up meetings two or three times a week, where each team member shares what they completed, what they’re working on, and any blockers they face. Meetings should be brief (10-15 minutes) and focus on keeping the team updated.

A stand-up can also run asynchronously on your team’s messaging platform, on the days between meetings or when schedules don’t overlap. Hold at least one a week, in either form, so a blocker waits days rather than the whole sprint.

Keep brief notes of key discussion points: important decisions made, challenges raised, and how they were addressed. These notes make any sprint write-up fast and accurate.

A good output is an agreed cadence and format written into your charter, plus a week of stand-ups actually held.

Two truths and a bug

Team Activity

Find out who you’re actually working with, in the fifteen minutes before anyone opens a laptop. Fifteen minutes, once, when the team first sits together. The working agreement guide covers the norms a team writes afterward, once it knows who it has.

Write three claims each: two true and one invented, all about your life with computers. Specific beats impressive: “I took down production with a missing semicolon”, “I learned to program on a graphing calculator”, “I have never once used a debugger”.
Guess before the reveal: the team votes on which claim is the lie, then the author says. One round per person, a minute each, no deliberating.
Chase the interesting one: whichever claim caused the most argument, ask for the story behind it.
End with a want: one sentence each on what you most want to be better at by the time this project ends. Nobody collects these; you say them out loud so your teammates know what you’re here for.

A good output is that every person can name something about each teammate that the roster doesn’t say, and one thing each teammate wants to get better at.

Team Formation Strategies Assessment

Team Activity

Identify which stage of formation your team is in, and apply appropriate strategies to move your team forward. Start from Tuckman’s stages of group development.

Stage	Characteristics	Strategies
Forming	Team members are polite, roles are unclear, high dependence on leader for direction	Clarify goals, set expectations, encourage open communication
Storming	Conflicts arise, clashing ideas, team members challenge each other	Address conflicts openly, promote active listening, foster trust and collaboration
Norming	Team begins to resolve differences, stronger cohesion, more cooperation	Encourage collaboration, reinforce team norms, facilitate role clarity and feedback
Performing	Team operates efficiently, strong autonomy, high motivation, and productivity	Support autonomy, celebrate successes, continue providing feedback, and adapt as needed
Adjourning	Team disbands after completing goals, members experience mixed emotions	Celebrate achievements, conduct reflection sessions, provide closure and next steps

Optionally, run this a second time with an AI agent and set the two outputs side by side, noting where they differ, because the comparison shows what the tool changed; either version can be the one you keep.

A good output is your team’s current stage named, with the specific strategies you’ll use to move to the next one.

Team Dysfunctions Assessment

Team Activity Workshop

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team model names five barriers to teamwork: lack of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Name the ones your team shows, then pick a strategy for each.

Here’s a table outlining the five dysfunctions of a team from Patrick Lencioni’s model, with their characteristics and strategies:

Level	Dysfunction	Characteristics	Strategies
1	Absence of Trust	Team members are unwilling to be vulnerable or admit weaknesses.	Build trust through vulnerability, encourage open communication, and team-building activities.
2	Fear of Conflict	Team avoids discussions or disagreements, leading to unresolved issues.	Foster a culture of healthy debate, encourage open dialogue, and address conflicts directly.
3	Lack of Commitment	Team members are unclear about decisions or hesitant to fully commit.	Ensure clarity in decisions, create shared goals, and make commitments visible.
4	Avoidance of Accountability	Team members hesitate to hold each other accountable for their responsibilities.	Set clear expectations, create accountability structures, and encourage peer-to-peer feedback.
5	Inattention to Results	Focus shifts from collective success to individual goals or status.	Focus on collective outcomes, track measurable results, and celebrate team achievements.

Here’s a shorter video of the model.

A good output identifies the dysfunctions within the team, proposed strategies for addressing each dysfunction, and a reflection on how these will improve team performance.

Team Health Assessment

Team Activity Workshop

Health checks are a structured input for your retrospectives: run one before a retro and the discussion starts from data instead of vibes. The formats below also work well as the basis for a term or project retrospective.

Google’s Five Dynamics

Google has identified five key dynamics that distinguish effective teams:

Psychological Safety: team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable without fear of embarrassment or punishment.
Dependability: members reliably complete quality work on time, ensuring trust and accountability within the team.
Structure and Clarity: clear roles, plans, and goals are established, providing direction and understanding of expectations.
Meaning: work is personally significant to team members, fostering motivation and engagement.
Impact: team members perceive their work as making a difference and contributing to the organization’s goals.

Of the five, Google’s research found psychological safety mattered most.

Self-assess (green/yellow/red) your team on these five dynamics. You can use Google’s Discussion Guide.

Team Barometer

Jimmy Janlén outlines how to use the team barometer to assess if the team is getting better over time. Self-assess (green/yellow/red) your team on these cards. Feel free to opt for alternatives such as fewer cards or the perfection game (see original article).

Card	Green	Red
Trust	We have the courage to tell each other the truth. We don’t hesitate to engage in constructive conflicts.	Members rarely speak their mind. We avoid conflicts. Discussions are tentative and polite.
Collaboration	The team cross-pollinates, sharing perspectives, context and innovations with other teams, and other parts of the organization.	Work is done individually. Little or no collaboration within the team or with other teams.
Feedback	We give positive feedback, but also call out one another’s deficiencies and unproductive behaviors.	We rarely praise each other or give feedback or criticize each other for acting irresponsibly or breaking our Working Agreement.
Meeting Engagement	People are engaged in meetings. They want to be there. Discussions are passionate.	Many feel like prisoners in the meeting. Only a few participate in discussions.
Commitment	We commit to our plans and hold each other accountable for doing our best to reach our goals and execute assigned action points.	We don’t have real consensus about our goals. We don’t really buy in to the plan or follow up that people keep their commitments.
Improving	We passionately strive to figure out how to work better and more efficiently as a team. We try to “know” if we get better.	We don’t focus on questioning our process or way of working. If someone asked us to prove that we’ve gotten better we have no clue how we would demonstrate that.
Mutually Responsible	We feel mutually responsible for achieving our goals. We win and fail as a team.	When we fail we try to figure out who did what wrong. When we succeed we celebrate individuals. If we pay attention to it at all…
Power	We go out of our way to unblock ourselves when we run into impediments or dependencies.	When we run into problems or dependencies we alert managers, ask for their help, and then wait.
Pride	We feel pride in our work and what we accomplish.	We feel ashamed of our pace and the quality of our results.
Relationships	Team members spend time and effort building strong relationships among themselves, as well as with partners outside the team.	We don’t really know each other or what makes others “tick”.
Ownership	We engage in defining our own goals and take ownership of our destiny.	We act as pawns in a game of chess. We don’t demand involvement in defining our goals and destiny.
Sharing	We share what we know and learn. No one withholds information that affects the team.	People do stuff under the radar and often forget to share news or relevant information.
Boosts each other	We unleash each other’s passion and care for each other’s personal development. We leverage our differences.	We don’t know in which areas people want to grow. We have trouble collaborating since we are very different and view things differently.
Loyalty	No one has hidden agendas. We feel that everyone’s loyalty is with THIS team.	The team feels like a diverse group of people with different goals and loyalties that lie elsewhere.
Passion	Each member wants THIS team to be great and successful.	People just come to work for 8 hours and focus on their own tasks.
Integrity	We honor our processes and working agreements even when we are put under pressure.	Our behaviors, collaboration, and communication fall apart when we get stressed.

Spotify’s Squad Health Check

Spotify started running Agile squad health checks around 2014. They’ve since reflected on their experience. Self-assess (green/yellow/red) your team in these areas.

Area	Example of Awesome (green)	Example of Crappy (red)
Easy to release	Releasing is simple, safe, painless & mostly automated.	Releasing is risky, painful, lots of manual work, and takes forever.
Suitable process	Our way of working fits us perfectly	Our way of working sucks
Tech quality (code base health)	We’re proud of the quality of our code! It is clean, easy to read, and has great test coverage.	Our code is a pile of dung, and technical debt is raging out of control
Value	We deliver great stuff! We’re proud of it and our stakeholders are really happy.	We deliver crap. We feel ashamed to deliver it. Our stakeholders hate us.
Speed	We get stuff done really quickly. No waiting, no delays.	We never seem to get done with anything. We keep getting stuck or interrupted. Stories keep getting stuck on dependencies
Mission	We know exactly why we are here, and we are really excited about it	We have no idea why we are here, there is no high level picture or focus. Our so-called mission is completely unclear and uninspiring.
Fun	We love going to work, and have great fun working together	Boooooooring.
Learning	We’re learning lots of interesting stuff all the time!	We never have time to learn anything
Support	We always get great support & help when we ask for it!	We keep getting stuck because we can’t get the support & help that we ask for.
Pawns or players	We are in control of our destiny! We decide what to build and how to build it.	We are just pawns in a game of chess, with no influence over what we build or how we build it

Close by updating your team charter with what the check surfaced: roles, the decision process, and anything your last retrospective changed. The working agreement guide has the patterns.

A good output is your completed health check, with the two lowest-scoring dimensions carried into your next retrospective as agenda items, and your team charter updated with what the check surfaced.