True Colors Facilitation Guide

Studies show that diverse teams that have psychological safety amongst each other are higher performing (reference). True Colors is one activity that can help both to celebrate your team's diversity and to build that trust and psychological safety. The below is a facilitation guide for an easy True Colors workshop activity you can facilitate with your team.

Goals

• Get to know each other and build trust on the team
• Build self awareness about each of our unique personalities impacts how we work together
• Have fun

Prework

Each attendee should fill out the True Colors quiz beforehand.

Agenda

Introduce the activity (~10 min), Breakout sessions by color(~20 min), Report back and wrap up (~20 min)

Introduction

The goal of your introduction is to center your team on coming together and to review the colors (for example, you might review the table in the results page here). You may wish to acknowledge that these things can require some vulnerability, but that showing up for them fully is valuable. You can say:

• "Thank you for being here and making time for this"
• "If you're able to close your slack and non-related windows, please do"
• "The color buckets are a simplification and may feel hokey to some of us. We can view them as one tool that is available to us, giving us a shared language to help with collaboration and self-awareness. Thank you for being brave to try it out and build our team culture!"

Breakout groups

If you have a big enough group, have participants break out into groups by color. You may wish to identify a facilitator for each breakout group beforehand. If you don't have enough people for breakouts, participants can take time to reflect individually and write down their thoughts.

• Do you identify strongly with your primary "true color", or with multiple colors?
• What's it like to be your color?
• Do you think your color is the same at work and home? Why or why not?
• How does your primary color impact how you work with others?
• Can you think of a time when personality differences reflected in this model may have caused or worsened conflict? What might you do differently in the future?
• What do you want others working with or interacting with you to know?

Report back and wrap up

Bring folks back together and give each breakout group time to share back what they talked about. After share backs you may wish to ask the whole group some reflection questions:

• "What does it mean for our company or teams when we have certain colors over and underrepresented?"
• "What did you become more aware of or take away from today?

As you wrap up thank everyone for showing up! If you use slack, you can suggest folks put an emoji with their color in their slack status for the day💙💛💚🧡