Team Treaty

This activity is a personal favourite. It’s a great practical way of discovering and discussing team values.

When it comes to teams succeeding together or not, an important aspect is making sure everyone understands each other’s hopes for the year.

This activity guides the team to be on the same page and understand both what helps their teammates feel valued and what they think is required to achieve on their decided goals.

It is recommended that this activity is done after the ‘You Have Value’ and ‘We Succeed Together’ facilitated video sessions have been completed. This activity acts as a re-enforcer to help get clearer direction and involvement from players, based on learnings and brainstorms from those two sessions.

This activity does not require background prep but does require equipment. It can be done inside or outside on a sports field.

Equipment

• Sports item of your choice i.e. hockey stick, rugby ball, soccer ball OR large piece of paper
• Permanent markers/coloured pens

Instructions

• Get the team in a circle and remind them of the E Tū Tāngata mindset and the three strands (You Have Value, We Succeed Together and Others Matter). You can bring up the action points decided on by the team for each of the strands if you’d like.
• Talk about the importance of team values and introduce this activity as creating a ‘team treaty’ (describe what a treaty is if necessary).
• Use your chosen object as a ‘talking stick’. Pass the object round the circle and ask everyone to share something that they would like to be a team value.
• Once everyone has gone round, repeat all the suggestions. This is important for reminding everyone, but also making sure each person has felt heard and valued.
• Together, pick three to five values that will be your team’s treaty. You could base this on repeated ideas or vote.
• Use the coloured markers to write the written values on your chosen piece of equipment.

Follow Up

• Bring your values to trainings and games as a reminder of the team’s chosen core values.
• This can be used as a visible object to speak back to throughout the season if the team are needing to be reminded of core values.