Promoting team engagement at Lloyds TSB
Using a new engagement technique to unite a group of strangers and turn them into a high-performing communication team.
by Todd Montgomery, managing director, tm consultancy and coaching 
"The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
This droll comment by the American poet Robert Frost neatly captures a problem that organizations face when it comes to engagement, namely: how to engage the whole person and create strong team relationships rather than a series of impersonal task-transactions. One way to achieve this is with a very specific use of storytelling – what I call the "Passion Piece".
This simple communication exercise helps people connect with each other at a fundamental human level by sharing their personal stories in a safe and positive setting. The result is a more socially-cohesive and trusting team dynamic, which serves as a solid foundation for long-term team engagement.
The Passion Piece
The Passion Piece exercise is the product of working with my colleague Ellie Wallace. At that time Ellie had just accepted an in-house role as head of internal communications for Retail Banking (RBIC) at Lloyds TSB Bank. As a new manager, she faced the usual pressure to produce tangible changes and results within the "first 90 days" followed by sustained delivery.
As a former consultant, however, Ellie's plans for the department were more ambitious. She sought to develop an "internal consultancy" model of service provision as part of the bank's overall aim to professionalize communication practice.
This model represented a very different way of working – both professionally and culturally – within the communications department itself and the bank in general. To make this a reality she would need a cohesive and high performance communication team.
The newly reorganized team contained a diverse mix of people: communication experts with little financial services industry knowledge and Lloyds TSB employees with widely varying levels of communication skills and experience. Some people knew each other and Ellie from before, others were strangers to the team and its new leader.
What Ellie wanted was to quickly get this team working well together. We both agreed the way to do this was to help them connect at both the personal and professional level. The key question was: how to encourage people to share personal details about their lives outside the office with their work colleagues?
The solution we arrived at was to have team members tell each other short stories about their personal passions, and then to offer each other positive and appreciative feedback in order to create the "safe space" required for such personal revelations. The result was better than we had ever expected.
Storytelling
The Passion Piece exercise involves team members writing a one-page story (about 500 words) on something outside their work life about which they're passionate – hobbies, pastimes, interests, sports or avocations. Spelling and presentation are unimportant - the point is to write it as though you were telling it to your best friend.
For most it was the first time they'd ever written such a story – and certainly no one had shared such a story with their colleagues in an open forum like this. The exercise therefore obliged everyone to take a risk, and required a good deal of mutual trust.
The exercise obliged everyone to take a risk, and required a good deal of mutual trust.
To create the right environment we held an offsite event with casual dress in a meeting room with lots of space and natural light. Chairs were arranged in a loose circle and we'd already done some introductory activities, interacting and moving around the room. Finally, each person was invited when ready to read his or her story our loud to the other team members.
Giving feedback - the Affirm technique
What followed was vital to the overall success of this exercise. Before the readings began, the team had been given instructions on a technique called the Affirm (see sidebar). Essentially, team members would each thank the storyteller for the story and mention something that they particularly liked, admired or appreciated about the story itself, the way the storyteller presented it, or even an observation about the person. A few examples might be:
“What I liked about your story was how well you described how music makes you feel and helps you express yourself. Very moving!”
“I’m impressed by just how passionately you follow F1 racing and your story makes me want to follow it too!”
“I really appreciate that you were willing to share your love of gardening with us and I like how you described it as your little sanctuary away from the world.”
Giving Affirms sounds like it might be a stilted, artificial or awkward exercise. In fact, people very quickly got a feel for it. The feedback flowed very naturally and it was always very gratefully received. Because storytelling is such a natural way for people to communicate with each other (see right) people almost instinctively feel connected and the Affirm technique gives them a way to act on that and express it both directly and appropriately.
As facilitator, it's good to thank each storyteller in turn and ask him/her how it felt to read the story and get the Affirms from team members – invariably the answer is, "Great! Yeah, really good!" In fact, knowing that they could expect such an agreeable and positive round of feedback, people very quickly went from feeling anxious about sharing their stories to practically jumping from their seats to volunteer.
The storytelling session produced a very positive buzz in the room that carried over into lunch and the rest of the offsite. During the 18 months that followed I worked with the team members both as a group and in one-on-one coaching conversations. While it's difficult to quantify the results of "soft" exercises like this, I can make three observations.
The first is that on the day of the exercise, there was a palpable change in the way people interacted. The personal interactions of the group of people that headed off to lunch together that day was profoundly different than it had been in the morning. They had walked into the room as a bunch of boxes on an org chart and they walked out chatting with each other like real people.
Secondly, during subsequent coaching conversations both the team members and I were able to refer to that offsite day as a sort of touchstone. The team dynamic forged by the Passion Pieces and other activities set a positive baseline of team interaction which could be drawn upon when conflicts emerged. The team had agreed to "get tough on the issues but go easy on the people" - something I think was made easier by knowing more about each other as people and not just faceless job roles.
On the first day, there was a palpable change in the way people interacted.
My final observation: a few months ago during a retrospective with team members on my work with the team, the activity they said did the most to turn a group of people into a real team was the Passion Piece exercise.
Key success factors
- This technique works best with a team of a dozen people or fewer.
- Get agreement from everyone in advance that they will write and share a story, as well offering an Affirm.
- The facilitator should also tell a story and offer Affirms, modeling Affirms when needed
- To encourage Affirms, place suggested sentence-starters on a flipchart: "What I liked about your story was…"
Melcrum's Employee Engagement Conference in Australia
Todd Montgomery will be chairing this year's Employee Engagement Conference, being held 21st - 22nd April in Melbourne. Download the program and reserve your place today.
Have your say
Have you undergone a similar exercise within your team? What were the outcomes? What were the negative/positive results?
Recommended resources:
How to get the most out of storytelling
PODCAST: Understanding storytelling in a business communication context
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