Market of Skills – An Exercise to Build a Strong Team
I have decided to share another team building exercise due to my previous post on Personal Shields being the most popular post on this blog by some margin.
In this post I am going to take you through the Market of Skills activity, and I will provide you with instructions on how to run the session and provide a template to use.
Getting to know your team mates at a deeper level is a great way to bootstrap a strong supportive culture. Doing exercises such as this one provides an opportunity to uncover what each team member hopes to achieve personally as part of a team and ultimately builds human connection. Having better connection will lead to better interactions, due to increased empathy, patience and perspective with your fellow team members.
As a team leader and coach, I like to use these exercises when I stand up a new team or if there have been some changes to personnel, as it gives the newcomers a chance to get to know their new colleagues.
The Market of Skills is one of my favourite activities that enables a team to explore how they can support each persons desire to grow in and develop, something that can be extremely powerful!
The Market of Skills covers the following:
A list of your core skills and strength - what are you good at and what can you bring or sell to the team
A list of skills you would like to develop personally - sharing your personal improvement focus areas with the team, the things you might like to buy
Hidden talents - things that people might not know about you, that might come in handy or interest people
A drawing of yourself - this part can be a bit of fun and helps lighten the mood
Your promo - how might you attract people to your stall. Another element to be creative and have some fun with
To start, it is a good idea for the facilitator to show their own prepared Market of Skills to help set the scene as an introduction. Here’s mine (I filled in using Krita), you can also print and draw yours out by hand (template to download below).
Explain to the team that to become stronger it helps if we get to know each other better, what we consider our strengths and skills, which areas we might like to grow in, and explore ways in which is can support each others development objectives. Let them know that time will be set aside at the end to plan out how we can best support each other.
Then hand out the market of skills template, including the instruction sheet. Either printed or shared electronically (templates below).
Give each person 10 minutes to complete theirs. Check in at the end to see if people still need some more time and offer up an extra 5 mins if required.
Once complete, ask each team member to walk the rest of the team through their personal shields. Allow 20 mins for this, depending on team size.
An alternative approach can be to pair up the team members and interview each other to complete the shield. Then take turns sharing the shields with the team with the interviewer telling the group about their colleague.
Some questions you can ask during the playbacks
What did they learn about their team-mate?
What did you like about their market stall?
What might you be curious to learn more about?
To get the most out of this exercise I suggest you set aside 15 mins at the end to allow people time to plan for ways they can help each other develop (buy, sell and grow skills).
Some examples could be:
Mentor or pair with a fellow team member in an area they are wishing to develop.
Setting up a group learning session on a semi regular cadence.
Or agreeing to be each other’s accountability buddies and checking in with each other on their learning plans and goals.
At the end, you can invite the team to play back their agreements and commitments on how they are going to support each other. You can ask them, ‘how will we know we have been successful in supporting each other to upskill’?. Perhaps you might agree to check in again and see how things are going.
I hope you have found this useful and I would love to hear your stories or see your examples if you give this exercise a go. Feel free to comment below or tag me in LinkedIn.
Template (Instruction and blank template)
