Personal Maps applied into remote teams

A few weeks ago I expertize something unusual in a new project that I started.

I was in a team (people from 2 continents and 5 different countries) for almost 3 weeks and suddenly we received a Retrospective meeting invitation which called my attention due to it was not only a meeting with my team but with another team.

After our retro meeting the director of the team asked how we felt like a team when we had the retro with our partners (I did not exactly what to answer because for me it was not a good experience), suddenly one of the teammates said, I did not like the meeting at all it was not a good experience due to I did not feel comfortable having a meeting with people that I have never met or talk before. Then other teammates started to also complain about the retro meeting.

The Director and Manager had a talk and they decided to resolve the problem with a happy hour meeting so I decided to propose them to have a meeting but use Personal Maps in order to have each member of the team present and talk about them and their work.

For this, I had prepared my personal map (displayed on the image below), explained to them how I wanted to share with the team my personal info and work info, the good thing was that the Director and Manager liked the idea so I had the green light to start with the experiment.

As the idea was to know the people that we work with, I consider it important to share some personal data, education, and future goals.

How the experiment was prepared

First I prepared a board with the names, and for each name, I had prepared the data to be filled for the Personal Maps.

This was prepared using the guide on Personal maps for Management 3.0 https://management30.com/practice/personal-maps/

After the board was prepared it was shared and explained to the Director and Project Manager for any feedback.

Then the board data was shared with the team in a mail with an explanation on how to feel it and how to use the tool. In the instruction it was mentioned that the team had 1 day to feel its data, The day arrived and we almost have the boards filled, people that did not fill its data received a kindly reminder to fill it.

The activity day

The plan for the activity was to share data and have fun for an hour so the time was something that needed to be controlled.

So there was a rule in order to have everybody’s presentation. Every team member had 3 minutes to present to each other.

I started resenting my data and my info, then we used a Russian roulette to have team members presentations, during each presentation there were people that present their data really fast and with all the required info and others presented just part of it J.

One of the things that I like was that the Director and Project Manager asked to not only be in the activity but be part of it presenting themselves. It was good due to there was something very common for many team members which was the love for the food so they shared some receipts and tips on the kitchen.

How the personal maps helped after they were presented?

The people within the team began to have more interest and empathy not only from their colleagues, but also aroused interest in their affinities, nowadays after two weeks of the experiment it can be seen that people enter the meetings and no longer remain in silence, but they communicate and have conversations about tastes and work (before the experiment there was absolute silence inside the meeting rooms until the moderator spoke).

On the other hand, it can be seen that people already have more direct communication without the need for intermediate roles intervening to solve existing problems.

Some days ago there was a new hire (new Product Owner), the team used the personal maps in order to present themselves (it was an idea that comes from them due to they mention it was a good a beginning for the PO to know them)

Conclusions

In order to have good communication, it is important to know the team members.

Using the personal maps helped to reach the goals in order to have people in better communication.

After this experiment I think that I would like to use this tool in order to know better my teammates, for this I would like to use data that is more related to their current work, future goals, and ambition related to their career in the company.

Also, I will consider this tool in my classes in order to know about the students for that practice I would like to use info related to them and goals for the future (5 years from here, 10 years from here), educational goals, and also personal goals.

I would like to thank @Erick Masgo for sharing his knowledge and experiences applying Management 3.0