When the team is the unit of delivery, trust matters
I’ve worked in single(ish)- and multidisciplinary teams and I firmly believe that holistic product development is best achieved through the latter. The products are better and cheaper too. Users aren’t the only beneficiaries; if the team dynamic is right, the team benefits too. Team dynamic influences all sorts of things but it’s especially important for engendering trust, amongst teammates, in one another’s competence and commitment.
Without trust, one of the strengths of multidisciplinary teams — seeing a problem through varied lenses — can become a weakness. One of the ways this manifests itself is through excessive focus on relatively small points of detail, which seem bigger when viewed in the context of a single discipline. This can lead to contention within the team and wastes time and energy that are better spent on product development. In other words, the team gets stuck.
Resolution requires being able to take a step back and seeing the big picture. Trust plays an important part in getting to the point where you’re able to accept a teammates’ take on a problem, shaped as it is by their disciplinary bias, as a component of the bigger picture. Because since you can’t quite see it through their eyes, sometimes all you’ve got to go on is confidence in their competence.
Building this confidence happens in big and small ways in the course of working with them. I remember rehearsing a presentation with a colleague who is an amazing storyteller. He gave me loads of useful tips and suggestions which made the presentation much better. But one point he made really stood out for me — inconsistent border sizes introduced unhelpful visual dissonance for the audience. He was right and while it seemed a relatively trivial point, that level of obsessive attention to detail was, for me, a marker of competence. That recognition made it easier to give way when he sometimes strongly pushed for a course of action for reasons that I couldn’t always relate to or which would impact the team’s work in ways that I didn’t like. Trusting in these circumstances was sometimes difficult but it was never blind — he had credit in the bank. I’d like to think his trust in my competence did the same for him. Mikey Allan’s post on consensus vs consent highlights why this sort of trust is so foundational to effective decision making within Agile, multidisciplinary teams.
Professional competence aside, trust is engendered by a belief in teammates’ commitment to the mission over personal glory. I was willing to take my on board my colleague’s advice because I trusted that he was motivated by a desire to help people really understand the work we were doing. It wasn’t about advancing his profile. The Harvard Business Review conducted a study on the impact of superstar hires. The post outlining HBR’s findings are worth a read. For one thing, it highlights the impact that hiring superstars can have on the behaviour of the teams they work with and how this makes trust difficult.
A high degree of collaboration and interdependence have been the hallmarks of the most successful teams I have been part of. Those teams were made up of clever and independent people with widely varying skills and strengths so interdependency didn’t come easily. But knowing that you’re working with people who know what they’re doing (and are really good at it) and are doing it for the right reasons makes letting go and trusting one another, easier.
It takes time, the right mix of people and effective leadership to create an environment in which trust flourishes. But when it happens, collaboration, interdependence and big picture focus become possible and teams start to fly.
