How To Engage A Virtual Team | Inspiring Intentions Activity

How to Engage a Virtual Team: Inspiring Intentions Activity

Break Up the Monotony and Help Your Group Connect with this Exercise

This is the first chapter and activity in a four-part series on exercises that help improve virtual team engagement. This chapter and the next three chapters correspond with YouTube videos I’ve created on engaging virtual teams, where I facilitate four different exercises.

I’m all about helping business leaders and educators increase connection and engagement in their teams. In this chapter, I’m not only going to share how you can do this, I’m actually going to facilitate an activity I call Inspiring Intentions.

You can simply read on and learn how to do this with your team. Or you can jump ahead to the Getting Started section below, and read some of the wording and framing I would use to facilitate this exercise for your group. (Just read it over ahead of time, then follow my lead.)

Having led group activities like this a lot, I have a particular way I facilitate engagement. I use certain phrases and approaches that I’ve found work well. Feel free to steal these, repeat what I say and use my methods in your meetings. Better yet, find some inspiration in the language and make it your own. 

Green Cards: Disrupting the Same Old Disengaging Meeting

As I mentioned in the last chapter, I’m taking a page from NASA here by using “green cards,” like what’s done in training simulations. In this context, a green card is basically a random event that changes the same; this requires everyone to be on their toes.

You’re probably not training your group for space travel, but the approach still applies, and I’ve adapted the exercise for our purposes. This concept of green cards is a great way to mix things up when you want to engage your team. What is really disengaging is repeating the same monotonous activity day after day. 

Click the same link. 

Join the same meeting. 

Show up with the same people. 

Have the same small talk. 

Humdrum. 

Throwing a green card disrupts this monotony. That increases engagement. This particular activity—Inspiring Intentions—is really good for the beginning of a meeting or the start of a new season, project or class. It allows people to focus on their intentions.

The exercise comes from and utilizes a deck of cards we created called We! Engage Cards. You can get this deck for yourself and use it with your group, or you can get one for everybody on your team. When everyone is playing with the same deck, and can hold up cards of their own, that creates a really fun, novel point of connection in a virtual or hybrid environment. 

That said, you can also access a printable, digital version of the deck totally free at www.weand.me/free, and send the link to your team for this activity.

Now, we’re ready to go. Below in italics is the actual phrasing I might use when speaking to a group to help frame and lead this exercise. In between, there are some facilitator notes that offer helpful variations or ideas as well. 

Getting Started

I want to spark disruption and change the normal flow of your meeting or class. What I’d love to do is tune into what our intention is for this time. The word intention comes from the Latin root meaning to stretch. I love this because really great intentions stretch to encompass the needs of everybody in the group, and pull people together, whereas an objective is typically very focused on what you as the leader may want to achieve. Intentions have a different level of empathy that incorporates the needs of the group.

That’s why we’re going to start with an exercise called Inspiring Intentions. If you have the We! Engage Card deck lying around, now is a good time to grab it. If you don’t have the deck, you can still access it digitally using the link above. Or find an image, object or quote on your own.

What I’m going to do now is invite you to take a minute. Choose a card with a quote or image that represents an intention you have for your time today. 

I’ve picked an image of a group of people traversing a mighty sand dune in the desert. Tying into that image, I might choose to say, “My intention today is to really lean on the support and help of my colleagues because I’m taking way too much on myself. So I’m going to be asking for your support and help throughout this meeting as we map out this future project.” You see how that ties into the image.

Your intention could connect to a quote. I’ve chosen one from author Richard Bach, “Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.” To go along with this, you might say, “My intention is to see all the challenges, roadblocks, obstacles, annoyances and frustrations as potential gifts.” You might think about how you can begin to reframe and adapt these obstacles. Focus on having that positive lens, as opposed to seeing these difficulties as roadblocks that stop you in your tracks. You can shift your intention to see possibilities rather than closed doors.

Do you see the magic that can happen when you get really clear about your intention and you share it with others? Oftentimes we have intentions that affect other people. But rarely do we share them with those people. 

Note: You may want to specify context for the intention, or ask participants to decide this. For example, is it an intention for the year or for their next all-staff meeting?

Take a 60-Second Break

Now, if you’re leading this exercise, stop. Take a quick break. Spend 60 seconds finding a quote or an image that represents an intention you have that you’d like to kick out to the group. 

Done?

Beautiful. Welcome back. If you have a quote or image in hand, it’s time to share it. 

On Zoom or whatever platform you’re using to meet with your team or group, hold that quote or image up to your camera. Use gallery view or something similar, so that you’re able to see everybody else doing this as well.

Next, what we do depends a little on your group size. If you have a smaller group, I’d love to have people quickly share, or “popcorn out,” their intentions. If you have a bigger crew, let’s break it up.

The instructions for Inspiring Intentions are on that card in the We! Engage deck. Split into groups of three to five people. Have everyone share their intentions in their small groups. Then talk about aligning those intentions. Take those three to five different intentions (one shared by each group member), and come up with one overarching intention per small group. When everyone comes back from breakouts, have each group share that larger, agreed upon intention. 

Take time to discuss these intentions as a full group. 

My hope is that these discussions were really useful. When we share our intentions, we start meeting for purpose, rather than time. Typically we get in this rut of filling the time from when the meeting begins until it ends, rather than paying attention to why we’re meeting.

By understanding your intentions and hearing others share theirs, you can connect better with what you want and the overarching group purpose.

For Your Review

If you’ve just been reading this chapter to learn about how to facilitate this activity, have an awesome time doing the exercise with your group. It’s amazing how a small adjustment can substantially increase engagement. Getting clear about your intention and sharing it with the group is a core ingredient to increasing engagement in a virtual team.