--- title: "How to wrap up the year with your team? · Sunergos" description: "And here it is! Another calendar year is coming to an end, and companies and organisations are counting their chickens – which goals were achieved and which targets stayed out of reach. I offer you a new way…" url: https://www.sunergos.ee/en/blog/how-to-wrap-up-the-year-with-your-team/ language: en --- [Home](https://www.sunergos.ee/en/) / [Blog](https://www.sunergos.ee/en/blog/) / Leadership Article · Leadership # How to wrap up the year with your team? Enn Saar Founder, partner · 17 December 2019 · 5 min read FemaleMale And here it is! Another calendar year is coming to an end, and companies and organisations are counting their chickens – which goals were achieved and which targets stayed out of reach. I offer you a new way to wrap up the year with your team. Cards with photos or drawings, and postcards, will help you sum up the year. **Place and presence** First, find a cosy room for wrapping up the year where you can sit in a circle without tables. Tables practically shout: “Put a laptop on me!” and the laptop beeps: “Open my lid and see if an e-mail arrived 15 seconds ago!” No one wants to share the year’s victories and difficulties honestly and sincerely if some team members are buried in their screens. **Step 1: Contact with each other** Even before starting to sum up 12 months, it is important that each member of your team turns their attention to listening deeply to themselves and the other team members. Every team has people who are more talkative and people who don’t like to speak at length in front of a group. So that everyone in your team can “warm up by talking”, ask them to start by talking briefly in pairs, for example on the following 3–4 topics: - “How has my working week gone?” - “What has made me happy in life this past week?” - “How am I preparing for Christmas and New Year?” - “What were my personal wishes or plans for this year and how have they gone?” After each question, ask the team members to change partners. Encourage them to talk with team members they don’t work side by side with every day. Talking in pairs quickly brings people’s thoughts and attention into the group. It also creates the feeling of being listened to. **Step 2: Time travel** When summing up, we tend to remember the successes and difficulties of the last three months better. To recall the whole year, fix a strip of masking tape on the floor of the room, with January at one end and December at the other. Ask participants to walk through the year month by month in pairs and remind each other of events in each month. Ask team members not to judge the events and situations. It doesn’t matter which events are recalled. This short walk along the timeline is needed so that everyone unrolls the events of the whole year from their memory and doesn’t stop at the last 3 months. **Step 3: Team members’ personal successes and difficulties this year.** Spread cards with photos or drawings on the floor and ask all participants to choose cards from the floor as follows: – 1–2 cards that characterise my successes at work this year. – 1–2 cards that show my failures or the difficulties I struggled with last year. Cards are powerful tools, because the images or pictures on them help us put into words topics that matter to us but that we haven’t managed or been able to put into words for ourselves. Once each member of your team has taken 2–4 cards, ask each of them in turn to share what their successes and difficulties at work were in 2019. This is where the other team members’ task is to listen and not get into arguments or judgements. Your role as team leader is to keep an eye on this throughout. _Note:_ don’t put the cards used in this step back in the deck. Keep them in a separate pile. You can use them at a later meeting, but not in this wrap-up. Now that everyone has been able to share personally, it is time to sum up the year as a team. **Step 4: Our team** Spread cards with photos or drawings on the floor and ask all participants to choose cards from the floor as follows: – 1 card that depicts our biggest success as a team in 2019 (it may relate to this year’s goals or be something outside the table of goals) – 1 card that characterises how I felt in this team over the past year – 1 card that depicts, as a metaphor, what I think can take us to the next level as a team next year. This may be something that was a difficulty for the team this year. Take 3 large sheets of paper and fix them to the wall. The first sheet is headed “Successes”, the second “How I feel in this team” and the third “What would take us to the next level”. Ask each team member to come to the sheets in turn and share their three cards with the others. Then ask them to fix their cards to the large sheets with masking tape or poster putty. **Step 5: Thanking each other behind their back** In this step you also need cards, but not picture cards – double-sided postcards, the kind you can write a lot inside or on the back of. Sit with the team in a semicircle. Place a single chair in front of the semicircle so that its back faces the seated team members. Each team member in turn gets to sit on this single chair, with their back to the team. The other team members take turns saying, about the team member sitting with their back to them, what they are grateful to them for or what they have admired in them, thinking back on the past year. For example: “I’m grateful that Ats helped me at the start of a difficult project with his practical advice on how to begin” or “I admire how Piia made very professional and thorough summaries of our services for clients”, and so on. While people express their thanks about the person sitting with their back to them, one team member briefly writes everything said on a postcard. When everything has been said about the person in front of the team, the written card is given to them and a new person sits on the single chair. It is important that people don’t start discussing and arguing while giving feedback. Every team member has the right to express their admiration and thanks to the person on the single chair. The role of the person on the chair is simply to listen and enjoy the feedback. Focus on the thanks you want to give each other. What the thanks are for doesn’t matter – even a friendly smile on a working morning is worth thanking for. Give every person similar attention. Even for someone who has been at work for just 1 month, there are things to be grateful for when looking back on the year. In recent years I haven’t met a team where people say: “We celebrate achievements and recognise each other too much! More would be harmful!” On the contrary – every day I see teams where people miss noticing what they have achieved together and noticing each other. With this way of wrapping up the year, what matters is that all team members get the chance to share the victories and moments that matter to them – personally, as a team and with each other. **Have a lovely year-end wrap-up with your team! Take time to give each other a pat on the back!** P.S. You can also do all this with your family or friends. Just replace the word “team” in the guide with “FAMILY” or “FRIENDS”, and the word “work” with “LIFE”. _Any sets of cards with photos or drawings work for these exercises. A selection of coaching cards is also available in the Sunergos e-shop: [http://epood.sunergos.ee](http://epood.sunergos.ee/)_ ![Enn Saar](https://www.sunergos.ee/images/team/enn-saar.jpg) About the author Enn Saar An experienced leader, team trainer and supporter of leadership development. Formerly head of development at Telia and Eesti Telekom and head of MicroLink. [Write to the author](mailto:enn@sunergos.ee?subject=How%20to%20wrap%20up%20the%20year%20with%20your%20team%3F) Related ## Read these too. [Communication and collaboration 3 May 2026 · 4 min ### A leader’s demonstrative sigh – as dangerous as shouting in a meeting Monika Prits](https://www.sunergos.ee/en/blog/a-leaders-demonstrative-sigh-is-as-dangerous-as-shouting-in-a-meeting/)[Client story · Communication and collaboration 25 April 2026 · 5 min ### “I had to step off the stage”: a head of department’s experience of service-based management Monika Prits](https://www.sunergos.ee/en/blog/i-had-to-step-off-the-stage-a-head-of-departments-experience-of-service-based-management/)[Client story · Communication and collaboration 1 November 2025 · 6 min ### Client story from the Ministry of Social Affairs: how we became a service-based organisation | part 1 Monika Prits](https://www.sunergos.ee/en/blog/client-story-how-the-ministry-of-social-affairs-became-a-service-based-organisation-part-1/)