What the Beep Warmup

15 – 20 minute dialogue to focus your people and be better together

To keep this to only 20 minutes, it is IMPERATIVE you pick something positive.

** NOTE – this is a fantastic longer workout to help you identify behaviors that work for and against you.  The beep is the cue and the behavior that follows is either what you want or don’t want.

For the Warm Up, we highly suggest you use celebration as a topic.  Celebration is very important to every team, yet is either forgotten or is lukewarm.  This is an easy area for improvement and is fun to talk about.

Teams that make time for celebration are far more likely also come together in difficult times.

As you will see, there is also a mistaken belief that you only celebrate at the END of something – closing a sale, end of a project, product launch, etc.  This is an error of leadership.

Some of the most successful and high-performing teams celebrate mistakes and failures!

Benefits of this warmup:

You are planting a seed for people to begin seeing opportunities to celebrate, which means you are planting a ‘positive’ seed in them to see what is good in themselves, one another and as a team.  This is like me saying, “DO NOT think of a pink elephant!”  Whoops, you just thought of a pink elephant.  You can’t help yourself.

Instructions

Steps:

• Briefly review this Warmup page prior to meeting with your group.
• Download PDF cheatsheet – print to help you with the group.
• Show the group the video above on the DIY Team Center
• Create a dialogue around celebration using the questions below.

Sample Questions:

• Do we celebrate?
• Do we WANT to celebrate? Why is it important to us?
• When do we celebrate? This is the beep.
• How do we celebrate now? This is the behavior.
• How do you WANT to celebrate?

Wrap up conversation with:

• Choosing a single beep to cue us to celebrate.
• Decide up on how to celebrate with one another.

Celebration examples:

• You close a sale and ring a bell.  Everyone cheers!
• In basketball, teammates high-five the player who is shooting free throws.This is a small ritual that gives support to a team member under pressure.
• Beer cart Fridays – let’s face it, getting to the end of a week can be cause for celebration.If alcohol is taboo, what is your version of ‘Happy Hour’?
• Epic Failures – celebrate mistakes but EPIC failures. This lets people know that sharing mistakes is okay and we can learn from them so they don’t happen twice. Who gets the ‘Epic’ trophy?
• Giraffe Award – celebrate those who ‘stuck their neck out’ and took a risk.
• The door at Moe’s Southwest Grill opens and employees yell, ‘Welcome to Moe’s, celebrating a new customers arrival.
• Virtual teams ‘go out for coffee or lunch’. Send your virtual teams a gift card for Starbucks and have everyone ‘meet’ via Skype and chat.

Celebration:

Every group benefits from celebration.  In almost every case, celebration is a positive and positively impacts the group.  As this is a warmup, you are planting the seed for people to begin seeing opportunities to celebrate which means you are planting a ‘positive’ seed in them.

Do not be confused about celebration.  Celebration is a ritual that a team shares together.  Celebration is not the ‘leader’ providing kudos to someone for a job well done.  That is recognition. 

Make sure when you are creating a conversation, you are talking about what the group/team wants, not what YOU can do as the leader!

Other behaviors:

The applications for ‘What the Beep?’ are almost limitless as it helps us identify behavior/habits and the cues that go with them.  These create informal culture and ‘the way we do things around here’, which can be VERY different from the published mission/vision/policies of the organization.

Future Workout:

This can be a warmup for a deeper discussion during a Team Workout. 

Provide this warmup one week and tell the group you will be having a much deeper and richer discussion the following week.  This warmup would prepare them for that workout.  What the Beep?  is a powerful workout that can provide hours of in-depth discussion.