Team Building
Team building here isn't trust falls - it's two short exercises, Shapes then Behaviour Types, that make a team's usual pattern visible enough to talk about, fast.
Six boxes run in sequence: pick a shape, explain it, map the group's mix, name the team's usual roles, watch a real interaction, then agree what to change.
Reach for this when…
- A team is stuck in the same unspoken dynamic every meeting and nobody can name it.
- New people have joined and the group hasn't found a shared way of working yet.
- You need a low-stakes way into a conversation about how the team actually behaves.
How to run it
- Each person picks a shape (circle, triangle, square, rectangle, squiggle) that represents their working style.
- They explain the choice to the group.
- Map the team's shape distribution and discuss what it means for collaboration.
- Introduce the list of team roles: task roles, maintenance roles, individual roles.
- Watch a real team interaction and note which roles show up, which are frequent, which are missing.
- Agree which roles to cultivate and which to dial down.
A worked example
Situation. Kadri Tamm ran Terviseallikas Wellness Clinic in Tallinn, Estonia, where her front-desk and clinical staff had drifted into two camps that barely spoke outside handovers.
Applied. The Shapes exercise showed every clinician had picked a triangle (driven, focused) and every front-desk staffer a circle (relational, connecting) - the split wasn't personality clash, it was two working styles with no bridge.
Result. She built one deliberate maintenance-role habit into the weekly huddle - a short round where each side named what the other had done well - and the camps started overlapping again.
The catch
The exercise only works if the debrief goes somewhere real - run without a skilled facilitator, it stays a nice quarter-hour people forget by Friday. Some participants dismiss it as a game before it's had a chance to land, which needs careful framing up front. And it surfaces a pattern; it doesn't fix the underlying reason the pattern exists.
The shapes exercise diagnoses a divide - it doesn't build the bridge. That's a separate piece of work.
Origin: Susan Dellinger / Kenneth Benne & Paul Sheats