ice-breakers don’t have to suck

In response to the recent post about excessive ice-breakers at work, Sarah Lichtenstein Walter shared the guide she created for her team about how to design good ice-breakers and what to avoid. I love it and am sharing it here with her permission.

Sarah says, “My favorite of these is the favorite/least favorite work activities — it legitimately helped my team work together better. I hate longer form writing and love doing data matching in Excel. I have a teammate who is the exact opposite. She edited/rewrote a grant proposal I was working on and I created a template for her to manage a process she’d been struggling with!

The favorite person at the company who isn’t on the team was actually really nice too, and our VP shared the nice things that had been said about people with them and their bosses.”