Trainers’ Toolkit – Empower your team

	Exercise nr 18:  Empower your team
Duration	25-30 min
Type of activity	Social / Body / Emotional / Cognitive
The goal of the exercise	Integrate and strengthen team bonds by mapping the strengths of team members.
Group size	this exercise is perfect for small teams – up to 6-7 people
Hashtags	#mapping #strenghts #teambuilding #empowerment
Materials and tools necessary for the activities	Jambord, Zoom or Miro bord
Exercise agenda	Prepare a Jambord, Zoom or Miro bord with names of your team members. Ask your team to select one volunteer. Then ask each person to write up to 3 strengths that they see in the volunteering person and write them on the post-its. For example, The strengths can be good work organization, punctuality, creativity, problem-solving ability, commitment, attention to relations, communicativeness, and openness to criticism. The STAR model can help team members name other people’s personality strengths. Ask the team to think about: S (specific situation) – describe the particular situation they found themselves in with this person. T (task) – explain what this person had to do in this situation. A (action) – tell what they did for it  R (result) – describe the impact of their actions, i.e. a specific benefit for the organization. The next step is to give short feedback to the volunteering person using the competencies written on the board with commentary explaining the choice. After everybody finishes giving their feedback, another person takes the volunteering role.  In the end, participants will create a collage of empowerment posts. Talk for a while about what you see in the pictures, did anything surprise, interest or amuse you?
Possible modifications	The exercise can also be a good closure for the meeting. You can include it in the meditation to think of the participants in this meeting and appreciate them. Ask participants to think about what they would like to thank others for and write it down in the chat room.
Credits	Compiled by Fundacja Culture Shock for TRENDSS – Transnational Roadmap for Educators in Digital Soft Skills (https://trendss.eu/)Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0Co-funded by the Erasmus+Programme of the European Union