T shaped exercise

Get a clear picture of your team’s skills with a T-shaped exercise

As you work with individuals in a certain capacity, you gain a sense of their skills in that area. If you are on a team of graphic designers, for instance, you can assume that your teammates have graphic design skills. But even within a specific area, people can have different specializations, interests, and knowledge that lend themselves to certain skill sets.

You can discover these specific skill sets and better utilize them in your team’s work with the help of a T-shaped exercise template. When completed as a team, the T-shaped exercise gives everyone a better picture of the team’s basic knowledge and skills, as well as the areas of interest and specialization.

Once your team has this information, it becomes a simple task to identify areas where individuals can improve and gain more knowledge, as well as who can teach team members new skills.

Using the T-shaped exercise template in Lucidspark

The T-shaped exercise uses the T as a map of an individual’s general skills (the top part of the T) and the depth of their expertise (the bottom part of the T). Lucidspark’s T-shaped exercise template gives each team member their own Ts to fill out, which can then be combined to create a T to represent the skills and knowledge of the whole team.

To use the template, first share it to your collaborative Lucidspark whiteboard. Then:

1. Have each team member pick a smaller T on the right of the template. Each T has a different color of sticky notes assigned to it, which you can set for each individual with Collaborator Colors.
2. Have each team member identify their different work-related skills and place them on the T. General skills (things they know a little about) should go at the top of the T, while specialized skills should go on the bottom part of the T. The more expertise someone has in a certain skill, the farther toward the bottom it should go.
3. Then, have each individual list their emergency skills and preferred new skills in the fields to the sides of each T.
4. After everyone has filled out their individual Ts, move to the large team T on the left side of the whiteboard. Have everyone add their relevant skills to the team T in the same places they are located on their individual Ts.
5. From here, you can identify the team’s emergency skills and skills you would like the team to learn, and you can determine which members of the team can help others.

As you go through the exercise, you can use emoji reactions, tagging, and a Slack integration to make the exercise more accessible and encourage as much collaboration as possible. When you’re done, you’ll have a handy resource to identify which teammates to turn to when you need help.