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Invisible team roles – exploring team effectiveness
Invisible team roles – exploring team effectiveness
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Working in international training teams means navigating diversity in working styles, expectations, communication patterns, and personal constraints.
What makes a team effective is not only the visible skills and contributions, but also how team members deal with the often invisible dynamics that influence collaboration. Trainers frequently work in multicultural teams where not everything is said explicitly, and where adaptability, awareness and reflection are key to success.
This activity creates a practical and embodied experience of teamwork under hidden conditions. By engaging in a shared physical task while carrying invisible roles, participants explore how individual behaviours, limitations and assumptions influence group processes. The experience supports deeper reflection on team effectiveness and learning within trainer teams.
By completing this activity, you will be able to:
- Experience how invisible roles, behaviours and constraints influence teamwork
- Reflect on personal patterns, roles and reactions in team settings
- Identify key elements that support effective collaboration in diverse teams
- Strengthen awareness of group dynamics and learning processes in teams
Participants form teams of approximately five people, and each team is assigned a planting area with prepared materials such as soil, plants and basic tools. The collective goal is to plant at least ten plants within sixty minutes, with the possibility to reach up to fifty plants if the team works efficiently.
Before starting the task, each participant draws one Role Card at random, reads it individually and keeps it private. Participants are expected to follow the role described throughout the activity without revealing or showing it to others, while behaving consistently with the instructions on the card.
Once the activity begins, teams organise themselves without additional guidance and work together to achieve the shared goal within the given time limit.
After the time is up, or once the goal has been reached, participants gather for a debriefing session of approximately twenty minutes. During this phase, each person reveals their Role Card and reflects individually and collectively on the experience.
- How do I feel about the experience?
- What were my highlights and lowlights?
- What were my roles and goals in the team?
- What are important elements when working and learning together in the team?
Participants discuss what helped or hindered the team and what they would do differently in future teamwork situations. Reflect together on what these insights mean for your ongoing development as a trainer. Go to the badge and submit evidence to submit your action plan of follow-up actions.
The Awero organisation created this educational resource and activity for the Erasmus+ Accreditation training for trainers.
This activity supports trainers’ competence development in the “Learning to learn” area. Activity content and badge issuing criteria aligned with the European Training Strategy (ETS) competence model for trainers to work internationally. In particular:
- Assessing one’s own learning achievements and competencies.
- Identifying learning objectives and pursuing them pro-actively.
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Team Roles Explorer Get this badge
The badge earner took part in the Invisible team roles activity, exploring team effectiveness through experience.
To get this badge, trainer:
- Experienced how invisible roles, behaviours and constraints influence teamwork
- Reflected on personal patterns, roles and reactions in team settings
- Identified key elements that support effective collaboration in diverse teams
- Strengthened awareness of group dynamics and learning processes in team
Activity content and badge issuing criteria aligned with the European Training Strategy (ETS) competence model for trainers working internationally.
Learning duration: 90 mins.
Uzdevumi
Task no.1
Evidence verified by: one activity organiser
Reflect individually and collectively on the experience:
- How do I feel about the experience?
- What were my highlights and lowlights?
- What were my roles and goals in the team?
- What are important elements when working and learning together in the team?
Debrief on what is important from working in teams, name 2 or 3 things.
Organizētāji
Awero
Badge issuer recognized with
Badgecraft vada tīmekļa infrastruktūru mācību pilsētām un reģioniem. Eiropas konsorcijs palīdz attīstīties platformai ar līdzfinansējumu ES programmā Erasmus+
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