Time required: About 30 minutes, depending on group size.
Instructions:
In a team discussion, ask team members to:
- Consider a stressful workplace situation they dealt with in the past.
- Rate their level of predictability of the past situation (the extent to which it happened as they expected), from zero to 10.
- Rate their level of control over the situation as it was happening, from zero to 10.
Ask team members to share their responses. You can consider going first to break the ice.
Once there has been some discussion, ask a couple of team members if they’d be willing to answer a few more questions about how they responded. Write down some of their ideas.
Suggested wording:
- What were the things you did right in this situation?
- What did you contribute to the resolution of this situation?
- What lessons were learned,or how did you grow from this situation?
Instructions:
After team members have responded, tell the group that managing stressful workplace situations is more difficult when we don’t anticipate or predict the event could occur. It’s also harder , when we have a lack of control over the outcome.
Ask if anyone wants to share a strategy they’ll use as a result of the discussion. If there’s no immediate response, share some ideas you noted from the previous questions. After some discussion, provide the brief wrap-up below.
Suggested wording:
By reviewing what happens in stressful situations, and considering how to prepare for future situations, we can help build our personal resilience. We’ll also build as our strategic approaches to problem solving.
Thank- you for your ideas. Hopefully we have new strategies we can draw on to help reduce the stress of situations where we might have felt a loss of control in the past.
Find more activities like this at Team building activities.