One way to increase your mobs understanding of how to work and communicate better with each other is by sharing your personality traits with each other.
To run a group session on personality types there has to be a high level of trust in your group and a clear understanding of what the motivation is—you’re doing it to understand how to work and communicate better with each other, not to self discover.
First off, pick an appropriate assessment for everyone to do. You want one where the focus is on the strengths to each trait instead of just where someone is strong or weak in things.
There are currently two popular assessments that do this: Via Character Survey and Gallup’s CliftonStrengths.
If you decide to go with an alternative to these two make sure you review it and that it focuses on peoples strengths before sending it to your team members.
Next, you want an external person to your group to facilitate the session; having someone external facilitate allows everyone in your group to participate. If you choose to go with the Via Character Survey or the CliftonStrengths survey there are usually trained coaches you can bring in to facilitate the session.
Whoever you get to facilitate, make sure you get someone neutral. At all costs avoid having the facilitator be a manager or someone seen as an authority figure in your organization; it’s near impossible getting people to talk about areas of growth when they feel it can impact their career progression.
Keep the group attending the session small, if it is too large it becomes hard to relate to individuals and what they are saying. Because the focus of this book is in relation to mobbing, I recommend you just have the people involved in your first mobbing sessions attend (we cover this on xxx).
When booking the session, find a place conducive to meaningful conversations; you want people to be able to relax and feel safe sharing their vulnerabilities. I’ve had most success with by getting everyone out of the office to an off site location.
Before the actual day, you want everyone attending to have completed the assessment and reviewed their individual results; if you have made use of a professional coach it’s ideal for them to have met with each person before the group session to go over their individual outcomes.
On the actual day when the facilitator starts the session they need to clearly outline the objective—you are getting together to understand how to work and communicate better with each other and what unique strengths each person brings to the group.
As the facilitator goes through each persons strengths they should get feedback from the individual if they feel this a good representation of who they are, what they feel is accurate and what isn’t. Once the individual has spoken the discussion moves to the rest of the group on whether they feel it is aligned and what other strengths they have observed.
Usually a session like this can take anywhere up to two hours for a small group to complete. If done well at the end of the session everyone has a deeper understanding of who they are working with and what their strengths are.
