ACE: An Approachable Model for Team Building
by Dr. Troy H. Campbell
The buzz words “team building,” “team culture,” and “team maintenance” can be really off-putting. They often come with negative associations, like overly bubbly or overly serious trainers and horrible variations on trust falls.
At On Your Feet, we have a simple, approachable model for teams. The ACE model covers what to do on team-building days, but it’s based on actions that should be taken every day to build a better team: acknowledge, connect, and explore.
The Basics
The core idea is straightforward and simple: in every team experience, take some time to acknowledge, connect, and explore. The model is built on the truth that all great teams and all great relationships, in general, consistently take time for ACE.
Sometimes this will involve team members spending just a minute or so on one of the key actions. Other times it will involve extensive experiences for one or all the actions. Regardless, keeping ACE alive in most of your team experiences—even small things like emails—will help your team be the best it can be.
Why It Works
In broad terms, acknowledging, connecting, and exploring are the fundamental components of most great professional and non-professional relationships, making the ACE model approachable and easy to put into practice.
The ACE model is in an intentionally approachable method designed by scientists, artists, leaders, performers, speakers, and trainers to be something more all-encompassing and useful.
Why ACE Is a Model for All Teams
It’s extremely easy to tool-ify
The three key actions of acknowledging, connecting, and exploring can be broken down into distinct tool-ified experiences, with 60 second to 60 minute versions.
On Your Feet has created extensive tool guides with videos that begin with the short, basic version and expand on longer, more complex, and more energetic versions.
It works for different personalities
ACE is a model that can be applied in very enthusiastic and extroverted ways or done in simple, calm, and straightforward ways.
We’ve developed a customized ACE toolkit for leaders that varies from dramatic “Future Stories” activities to really simple but powerful activities like the “Compliment Game.”
It fits in with what you’re already doing
The ACE model is built to fit into existing meetings and methods and doesn’t require you to change much. You just need to infuse a bit more acknowledging, connecting, and exploring.
For instance, the “Compliment Game” or the only slightly more involved “Scavenger Hunt” and “True for You” experiences fit and support your team’s regular daily objectives and goals to strategize, converse, ideate, and give feedback.
It’s deeply based on science
The reason the model is so effective is that it’s based on the best behavioral, organizational, and social psychology research. With each activity, you access the most powerful science and best practices.
For instance, an activity like “Compliment Game” accesses people’s need for acknowledgement and competence recognition and works by accessing the psychology of structure and constrained creativity.
It works for the daily stuff and the big team day stuff
The ACE model guides daily actions, and it provides a three-part story-like structure for team events like celebrations, summits, strategy sessions, exploration days, or focused team-building days.
It always works best to have big team events facilitated by professionals. But On Your Feet has also taught many companies to powerfully design and deliver their own ACE-focused versions of team-building days and quarterly summit meetings.
For Everyone
ACE is a powerful, simple approach to team building that can bring more joy, less fear, and better results to your team.
Some of you will take this model and do the really energetic and complex stuff, like the advanced version of the acknowledging experience “Award Show.” Others will do simpler versions of tools like “Compliment Game,” which is simply a structured way to have team members compliment one another.
Regardless of the personality of you and your team, you can start using ACE and the ACE tools today.
