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Give and Take

This is a great, simple, streamlined way to get all the tasks a team must perform out onto paper where everyone can see them and agree on them. It is one of those activities that looks much more complicated in print than it is in reality. Just to give you an orientation, here is a brief summary of the activity:

After agreeing on a common goal or project, each team member writes down three items that she expects from each of the other team members. Without discussing these items, each team member now writes down three items that she wants to give to each of the other members. Team members organize these items into a Give and Take Matrix and negotiate their roles and responsibilities to achieve a perfect score.

Purpose

To clarify roles and responsibilities of each team member in their joint effort to achieve a common goal.

Participants

3 to 10 members of an intact team. (If there are more than 10 members in the team, you are probably going to face coordination problems. So consider reducing the size of your team; or creating sub-teams for sub-tasks within a project.)

Time

30 minutes to 3 hours. The actual time requirement depends on the number of team members and how well they understand each other's roles and responsibilities.

Supplies

Flow

Here are the steps for conducting this activity. To illustrate each step, examples are provided (in italics) from a meeting of a conference team.

Specify a common goal. Ask team members to discuss their goal to ensure that they have a shared mental picture. Encourage team members to discuss the quality standards related to this goal.

Eric, Heidi, Peter, John, and Anita meet to play GIVE AND TAKE. They begin the activity by agreeing on the team's goal -- to design a brochure for next year's international intercultural conference in Zurich. They discuss the criteria for ensuring that the brochure will be professional looking, easy to read, and convenient to use.

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Introduce Take List. Give each team member a pad of green Post-It® notes. Explain that they are going to create a Take List that specifies what each team member needs to take from each of the other team members to help achieve the goal. Ask each participant to write her name on top of the notepaper followed by the phrase "takes from ____", filling in the name of another team member.

Prepare Take Lists. Ask each team member to list three items that she needs from each of the other team member (whose name is specified in each Take List) in order to ensure that the team achieves its goal. Ask each person to work independently, without talking to the others.

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Collect the Take Lists. After a suitable pause, gather the Take Lists from each team member, making sure that there is a list for every other team member. Put these lists aside without reading them.

Since there were five members in the team and since each person wrote four Take Lists, the team produces a total of 20 Take Lists.

Introduce Give Lists. Give each team member a pad of yellow Post-It® notes. Explain that they are going to create Give Lists that are the opposites of the Take Lists. The Give List specifies what each team member will give to each of the other team members to help achieve the common goal. Ask each person to write her name on top followed by the phrase "gives to ____", filling in the name of another team member.

Prepare Give Lists. Ask each team member to write a list of three items that she will give to each of the other team members in order to help the team achieve its goal. As before, ask each person to work independently, without talking to the others.

Prepare the Give and Take Matrix. While team members are busy writing their Give Lists, draw a matrix on the flip chart and label each column and each row with the names of the team members, in the same order. Ignore the diagonal cells with the name of the same person as the label for both the column and the row. Notice that each of the other cells of the matrix is identified with a name for the column and a different name for the row.

Here is the matrix for the conference program team:

Post the Take Lists on the matrix. Organize the Take Lists that you collected earlier by the name of the person that appears as the first word in each list. Work through each column of the matrix and stick each list (with its three items) on the top half of each cell.

Here's the matrix with the Take Lists placed in the correct cells. Notice that the diagonal cells (with the same person's name for both the column and the row) are blank:

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Collect and organize Give Lists. After a suitable pause, gather the Give Lists from each team member, making sure that there is a list for every other team member. Work through each row of the matrix and stick each note (with its three items) on the lower half of the appropriate cell.

This is what the matrix looks like at this juncture:

Score the matrix. Inform participants that you are going to analyze the matrix and discuss ways to improve the teamwork. Explain that each cell in the matrix can earn a maximum score of 3 points if the items in the Take List are the same as the items in the Give List. If the actual score for the matrix is the same as the maximum possible score, all team members share the same mental map of how they should interact with each other. With the help of participants, go through each cell in the matrix and write down the scores. Add the scores and compare this total with the maximum possible total score. Discuss the difference.

The conference team matrix yielded a total score of 27. Since there were 20 cells in the total matrix (ignoring the five blank cells), the maximum total score is 60. The actual total score of 27 is 45 percent of the maximum indicating there is plenty of room for improvement!

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Compute and discuss empathy scores of individual team members. Work through each row and add the scores of all cells in that row. This total indicates the correlation between what the team member is willing to give the others and what the others want from her. If the total score for a row is the same as the maximum possible score, this team member has a high level of empathy since she is giving to the other team members exactly what they want from her.

In the conference team matrix, Heidi received the highest empathy score of 5. Since the maximum score for the row is 12, Heidi's level of empathy was slightly less than 50 percent. The other team members scored lower, with Sam scoring a dismal 16 percent.

Discuss ways to move toward a perfect score. Debrief the activity by working through each cell in the matrix. Ask the two members associated with the cell to explain what they want from each other and what they are willing to give each other. Invite other team members to facilitate this discussion. Emphasize the fact that all team members should focus on achieving the common goal. Based on these discussions, revise the Take and Give items on each cell to achieve a perfect score for the matrix.

The team needed more than an hour of heated discussion before each team member's expectations and commitments were aligned to each other. Although the discussion was exhausting, everyone ended up feeling positive about the shared understanding.

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Variations

In the previous example, we explored how GIVE AND TAKE can be used to help team members get their act together. Here is another application of this activity.

Cross-Cultural Communication. Use this version with teams whose members come from different cultures. Conduct the GIVE AND TAKE activity in its original form, except ask each team member to prepare a list of three cultural values that affect their teamwork. Each team member prepares only one list. Then ask each team member to prepare a cultural-values list for each of the other participants based on their previous knowledge of this culture. Create a matrix similar to the Give and Take Matrix, except the top half of each cell contains identical items for each column. Then score the matrix and discuss important cultural values and stereotypes.

Adapted from Sivasailam Thiagarajan's Give and Take Game, used with permission.

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