This is an important question to answer because when we meet, if we don’t invite people to contribute and connect, we’re missing out on value. Luckily my job is to help some of the top organizations and universities on the planet make connection and engagement really easy. I’m not going to hold back. In this video, I’m going to share 3 icebreakers that we can dive right into universally appealing and you came for one, I’m going to give you 3. Let’s get into it.
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Before we just dive directly into these 3 icebreakers, we have to take a quick like 20 seconds and ask why should we do icebreakers. You know, several decades of educational research point for the fact that when we know personal information about others, it actually creates communication shortcuts. You’ve seen this. If you watch like Ocean’s 11 there’s some movie where George Clooney turns to somebody and says like, “Hey, let’s do what we did in panama.” He has that shorthand that’s created. On a team whether you’re working within a small company, big company, non-profit university creating those communication shortcuts allowed allows you not only to be more engaged as the team and happier and more connected as Employees. But also more productive. You say icebreaker.
This is actually a hard video for me to make because personally, I’m on a mission to gently eradicate the word icebreaker and replace it with the phrase connection before content. I would say if you can do this that the impact of whatever you’re trying to achieve by leading an icebreaker will go way up.
Connection before content is different from an icebreaker because number 1, an icebreaker is a giant ship that breaks through ice. Most icebreakers that we do in meetings are actually ice creators. They’re awkward, they’re a little bit cheese perhaps. Like going around the room and sharing what color you want to be is not a great way to break the ice. It’s a good way to make people feel a bit awkward. What is a great way to break the ice is to connect before content.
The idea behind connection before content is that it allows people to connect to each other but it also connects to the purpose of why you are there. I’m going to share 3 exercises that allow you to connect to the purpose of why you are there and allows people to connect to each other.
Number 1 is the quickest. I have never met a person who doesn’t have too much to do in too little time. Sometimes we need to connect and we need to break the ice fairly quickly. The quickest way that I know.
1. Sentence Completion
Pick the beginning of a sentence, leave a blank at the end and invite people to either in small groups or depending on if you have a smaller meeting size. You can go around the entire room and just complete this sentence. Oftentimes, when people share one at a time it takes a long time because we fumble around with our words. Whereas if you give a uh create a sentence completion that allows you people to connect to each other and to purpose, really ,really useful. Some examples of really great sentence completions would be, ” Right now i’m feeling ___ and by the end of this meeting i’d like to ___.”
Be a little bit more complex. You could do just one sentence completion as well. “During our time today, I would love to be able to share about ___.” Going a little bit more personal. “Something most people don’t know about me is…” Going even more real. “If you really knew me, you would know…” Sentence completions really quick way to have everybody contribute to the meeting to have everybody’s voice heard. And 2 of the most essential pieces to make it an icebreaker non-threatening are voice and choice. You got to invite people to actually speak up. It’s not an icebreaker if only 3 people share. Giving people voice and choice is really essential and sentence completions does that.
2. Use questions
The opposite of sentence completions would be to start with a really great open-ended question that allows people to connect to each other and to the purpose of why you are there. I happen to be a really big fan of questions. My co-founder and I wrote a book called Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations That Matter that went off and became a number 1 bestseller and spread throughout the world and teams are using it to make connection and engagement easy in their own context. Assuming you may not want to pick up the book. And I’m not here to sell you books.
I’m going to share a couple nuggets of how to use questions really impactfully to create that connection before content or that icebreaker. The first one that I’ll offer is to actually just find a list of questions. You can find them for free online somewhere. We happen to have created a deck of cards called We! Connect Cards. The whole premise behind them is this idea that we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
We spent 2 years through this pretty rigorous research process to boil down 60 questions that most people haven’t been asked but are non-threatening and accelerate trust building and connection. Meaning, they make a really great non-threatening icebreaker. And to make it even more non-threatening, the cards are color-coded. There are questions that encourage some level of self-reflection. Honor the introverts in the group. Because typically icebreakers are very extrovert friendly and if you’re only doing extrovert friendly stuff, you’re leaving half the population out.
Green questions and courage some answers that are fun and light. Blue questions go a little bit deeper. I’ll give you 3 sample questions right now. From fun and light something like “What is something you’ve always wanted to learn? What is something you already know really well?” This is a phenomenal question to inject straight into a meeting. All the way up to “What are people usually surprised to find out about you?” The ice breaker here is very simple. You come up with a question at the start of your meeting. You invite people to get into small groups of 3 or 4. No more than 3 or 4 to discuss their response to that question. And then you get back to the large group and you invite people to popcorn out their responses to that question.
Wwhat it does is creates all these intimate non-threatening conversations in little mini clicks and groups. But then brings people back into one larger community and creates that collective cohesion and connection that you want that moves collaboration and accelerates communication quite a bit better. Well, that’s a lot of c words. The magic of on the cards in the deck and you can find this with a number of questions, is you can add context to the end of any question to make it really purposeful. Right? What is something you’ve always wanted to learn at work? At home? Related to parenting, etc.
You can take that set of 60 questions. And if you want to get a free set of 20 questions, there’ll be a link somewhere around here to weand.me/ideas. Go ahead and drop on there and we’ll just give you 25 free questions.
3. Me to We
All right. Number 3, last but not least. This last exercise is an introvert friendly exercise And the dynamic is that brainstorming 101. We’ve known for a long time that you should brainstorm alone first and together second. But when we do icebreakers, we cater to people who kind of think out loud extroverts that kind of blurt out. The idea of me to we is rather than having this loud uproarious conversation high energy Icebreaker, you actually give people a question, let them go off and journal on it for 3 to 5 minutes. Think deeply about it and then come back to the group with some really well thought out responses.
It’s a phenomenal way to create meaningful connection which is usually the goal of breaking ice. The goal of breaking ice is to have some thoughtful and intentional conversations that allow people to really see, hear and understand each other. Sometimes in order to do that, we’ve got to give people time to think. Hope you really enjoyed these 3 exercises from sentence completions, to this connection before content kicking off with a question that connects people to each other and purpose. Then lastly, this idea of inviting people to spend some time with me and then bring it back to the large group to create this larger we. It’s been a blast sharing some pixels with you. I trust this video was really useful to you. I trust that you can use one of these 3 to break the ice and make connection happen in your next meeting. Whether it’s online or in person.