One person rolled their eyes when I introduced “contracting.” It looked, to them, like a slow, slightly pointless warm-up before the real work started.
By mid-afternoon, that exercise was the reason the whole session actually worked.
I recently ran a half-day team development session for a leader and his team -his four direct reports and their own teams, eighteen people in total. A back-office function, several distinct sub-teams under one leader, brought together to strengthen connection and to see clearly how their individual work rolled up to deliver the wider strategy.
Here’s what happened, and what it taught me, again, about how teams actually change.
Where the Team Started
The room opened with genuine positivity. People described good collaboration, an open and friendly culture, strong work ethic.
Underneath that, a few quieter truths surfaced too. Too much work. Newer colleagues who didn’t yet know the rest of the team. A tendency for a few voices to fill every silence.
Nothing unusual. The honest starting point most teams have, if you ask the right way.
An Icebreaker That Revealed More Than Small Talk Ever Could
We started by getting people physically moving, placing themselves along a comfort zone, stretch zone and panic zone, in response to a run of scenarios. Camping. Solo karaoke. Running a marathon in two months. Presenting to 300 people. Asking for help. Giving difficult feedback. Cooking a full Christmas dinner. Then, tied directly to the afternoon ahead, having an honest conversation with a colleague they’d never really worked with before.
We debriefed a few people after each round.
People saw, immediately, how differently their colleagues were wired. What felt easy to one person sat firmly in someone else’s panic zone. That alone opened up curiosity and bonding that no amount of small talk would have reached.
The Exercise Everyone Underestimates
Next came contracting. What does this group actually need from each other to get real value from the afternoon?
The list came together fast.
Do: listen fully, stay present, phones away, everyone contributes, be curious, be honest, be on time, assume positive intent.
Don’t: interrupt, dominate, run side conversations, multitask, blame, stay silent.
We went further. What happens if there’s a disagreement? If someone’s late back from a break? If one person dominates the room? We named, out loud, how the group wanted to handle each one.
This is the exercise people tend to dismiss. It looks soft, obvious, barely worth the time.
It looks that way right up until something happens.
Not long after, the group broke for a few minutes. A handful of people came back late. I named it, referencing what we’d just agreed as a group. A few nods. We moved on.
At the time, it looked like a minor, individual slip. It was actually the first half of a pattern nobody had noticed…yet.
Picturing What Success Looks Like
The bulk of the afternoon was a visioning exercise. Imagine it’s January 2027, looking back on the best year this team has had. What happened? How did you work together? How did it feel? What would other departments notice and say about you – individually and as a team?
We sent people into breakout groups to build this out together, with clear instructions: twenty minutes, then back in the room.
When the Theory Became Real
Most groups came back later than agreed.
A few people said, honestly, they hadn’t registered the twenty-minute instruction at all.
Put next to the earlier lateness at the break, this wasn’t one or two individuals having an off afternoon. It was most of the room, twice, in the space of a few hours.
That’s when I probed properly. We’d agreed being on time mattered. Did this happen at work too?
The room said yes, immediately.
With meetings and even work deadlines.
So we asked the harder question. You said on-time mattered. Why did you say that? The answers were honest. Respect. Not wasting other people’s time. For several people, it genuinely bothered them more than they’d admitted.
What’s your personal role in this dynamic? When do you ignore deadlines, or not even know what the deadline is? When do you silently resent others for missing their deadlines to you? Everyone had to reflect as everyone had created this dynamic – by action or silence.
Then the real question. Knowing that, how do you want to handle this back at work?
That’s when the room properly shifted. This wasn’t a couple of individuals with a habit to fix. It was a shared pattern, visible to everyone at once, and everyone recognised themselves somewhere in it. People weren’t just naming a value anymore. They were seeing, in real time, the gap between what they said mattered and what they actually did, and how that gap quietly let colleagues down, including themselves.
That’s what contracting is actually for.
From Vision to Behaviour
With the pattern out in the open, we went back to the visioning work and asked what behaviours would need to be true to get there. What would need to stop.
I pushed hard for specifics here. Real situations from their actual business, not abstract principles. Theoretical discussions are easy to agree with and easy to forget by Monday. Timekeeping, unsurprisingly, made the list on its own merit.
Turning Reflection Into Commitments
We closed with pairs, each person naming what they were taking from the afternoon and two things they’d do differently, then firming up what and when with an accountability partner.
Sub-groups then got specific. What are you actually going to do? When? And, tying it directly back to the pattern we’d just named, how do you stop that becoming a live issue again?
Finally, individual reflection. Yourself, your leader, your colleagues, what you were giving yourself permission for, and what you were genuinely committing to. Each person named one takeaway out loud, captured on a flip chart for everyone to see.
What Changed
At the start, everyone anonymously scored their optimism about the year ahead on a scale of 1 to 10. We repeated it at the close.
94% of people scored the same or higher. The average finishing score was 8.25 out of 10.
A feedback questionnaire is still to come, and I’ll be curious what surfaces once the afternoon has had time to settle. Early signs suggest something real shifted, driven less by any single clever exercise and more by eighteen people willing to look honestly at a pattern they hadn’t noticed they created.
What would your team discover if two small, unrelated moments were placed side by side, right now?
If your team could use a session like this, one built around real conversations rather than theory, I’d love to talk about what that might look like for you. Contact me here.
