In today’s challenging and collaborative workplace, nearly everyone works in teams. Team productivity usually is attached with the highest priority by whoever in the managing or managed position. However, achieving high team productivity is no easy job. It not only lies in individuals’ capability to manage personal workload, but more critical is the healthy interpersonal dynamics within the team.
“Geniuses still make mistakes and having brilliant ideas and elite programming skills don’t guarantee that your software will be a hit. What’s going to make or break your career is how well you collaborate with others”.
Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman, authors of Debugging Teams: Better productivity through collaboration agree. In this book, they focus on how to debug a software engineering team and provide principles to become a better team player and a better team leader. Another famous book about computing project productivity is Tom DeMarco’s Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Although these two books approach team productivity from different perspectives, they both agree that it is sociology rather than technology that makes a healthy and productive team.
There are a bunch of practical and influential points in the two books. As a UCDavis MSBA student, I am in a team which mainly aims to optimize the current search algorithm of a website. Taking my experience as a member of this practicum project into consideration, I will discuss the following two ideas from the books.
Switch Roles
“On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths”, says Tom DeMarco. He indicates that if a person becomes a permanent leader, then he “cease to be a peer” and team collaboration begins to crush.
Our members noticed the importance of switching roles in the very first meeting. We just came to alignment that everyone has his/her strength and it is too early to just let someone be the leader. Consequently, we decided to switch roles between the project manager, process manager, and contact person from term to term. In other words, two out of six members will be the project manager, the leader, in each term. Notice that though we do not have a permanent leader, we explicitly appoint two to be temporary ones. By doing this, we successfully give the best play to everyone’s superiorities and maintain an equal culture. Also, we avoid the problem of ambiguous responsibility so that at anytime everyone knows what to do.
To be specific, I was the process manager last semester and I facilitated team productivity by taking charge of scheduling meetings and team development board management. Every week, I should check whether there is anything missing in the team calendar or if the team development board is well established according to everyone’s progress.
Apply HRT Principle
The theme of Humility, Respect, and Trust (HRT), which the authors define as the “core traits to remember” is throughout the Debugging Teams: Better productivity through collaboration. And HRT exists in my practicum team all the time. Two of our team members majored in computer science and have rich industry experience in data analytics. Whenever there is a new situation, they usually bring up a reasonable and practical solution. For the technical part, they are always ready to offer help. Despite the fact they contribute to team productivity on a large scale, what’s more valuable is their humility: they always share their knowledge in an equal position with the rest of us. Therefore, their modesty as well as talent win them respect and trust from us. On the other hand, our eagerness to learn and high quality of work also make us respectful and reliable for them. As one can imagine, this kind of bi-directional HRT boosts our team’s efficiency and productivity.
Learning to collaborate is just as important to success as it brings greater impact for the same amount of effort. Although not perfect, healthy interpersonal dynamics makes our team a strong one with high productivity.
