Psychological Safety Team Exercises

Tension Session Exercise

Normalize productive conflict on your team by using an exercise to map out the unique value of each role and the tensions that should exist among them. Teach that conflict and tensions are not the antithesis of cross-functional teams, but part of high performance and continuous improvement.

Activity Instructions:

1. Draw a circle and divide that circle into enough wedges to represent each role on your team. For each role, ask:
   1. What is the most common tension this role puts on team discussions? What one thing does the person in this role have to say that frequently makes others bristle?
   2. What is the unique value of this role on this team? What should this person be paying attention to that no one else is? What would we miss if this role wasn’t here?
   3. On which stakeholders is this role focused? Whom does it serve? Who defines success?
2. Answer those questions for each member of the team, filling in the wedges with the answers.

Facilitator Notes: 

• Emphasize how the different roles are supposed to be in tension with one another throughout
• Use examples of contentious issues that your team has been stuck on to illustrate these points.
• Talk about how you’ll use each of these different perspectives as criteria in your decision making from now on.

Once you go through this exercise, you’ll see that  when presented with all the information, the team will be able to align around a decision. Where they can’t, the most effective path is to defer to the team leader to make a call taking all of the perspectives into consideration.

What you’ll discover using this exercise will open up so many great discussions. Use it to address issues like:

1. someone who is advocating too hard for their narrow point of view
2. a team member who has stopped adding their unique value and as a result has left the team exposed in some way
3. A role imbalance on a team where role coalition overpowers other roles
4. Performance goals that are misaligned with the best interests of the team overall.

With heightened awareness and a shared language, your team will start to realize that much of what they have been interpreting as interpersonal friction has actually been perfectly healthy role-based tension. They’ll realize that ; they’re one of the main benefits of them. (Or as I like to put it, conflict is a feature, not a bug on teams.)