Transforming a group into a productive team
A month after I started my M.S in Business analytics (MSBA’20), from University of California Davis, I got selected to work in a team on a practicum project for one of my preferred MSBA industry partners starting October’19. Our work entailed applying machine learning and advanced data science to drive customer retention, churn and expansion decisions for the organization. The analysis combines usage data from their petabyte-scale platform and its CRM to identify strategies for customer retention and opportunities for market expansion. In this blog I willshare my experience of working in a diverse team and how we transformed a group of 8 people into a strong productive team.
Being a productive team by moving swiftly from storming to performing
Having worked for 5 years in the industry, I have worked in more than 7 teams at my workplaces. But this team was special as none of my previous teams has been this diverse in terms of socio-cultural aspects, nationalities, competencies and experiences. It has been an enriching learning experience both personally and professionally while working with team members from China, India, and Venezuela. It was interesting to see how we graduated from storming phase to performing phase in just a few weeks.
Playing my part to create positive synergy
Working in a new team has its own challenges. In the beginning we had hiccups because of infrequent communication, lack of familiarity, and initial level of trust. I drew parallels from my previous experiences and proposed a few team building activities that were helpful to improve team bonding. Knowing everyone beyond work helped develop trust by introducing the elements of reliability, integrity and transparent communication. When we started working on the project, we had to steer through ambiguity and had doubts about our direction, but setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based) goals helped break the task into smaller problems and reach defined milestones. Formally setting some ground rules to respect disagreements, invite suggestions, share frequent updates, encourage involvement and give constructive feedback helped us evolve as a team. Whenever we experienced friction or differences in opinion, it was taken positively as it helped improve the quality of the output. We preferred informal communication over formal meetings. While brainstorming for the project we identified individual strengths, passion, interests and weaknesses. I appreciated the differences and aimed to leverage each other’s strengths in order to have the team’s collective performance greater than the sum of members’ individual performances, resulting in positive synergy.
Ingredients of a productive team
Every team is different and will require different strokes for different folks. To help you make your teams function better, I want to share some interventions that worked for us.
1. Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! Irrespective of the fact that the team is new or old, communication has to be strong. It not only helps everyone know each other better but also helps achieve a critical objective of keeping everyone on the same page at all instances and clears confusion.
2. Respect the diversity within the team and make it your strength — there is always something to learn from someone who has different qualifications, skill sets and working style.
3. Have an agenda for the meeting beforehand — this helped us structure the meetings and not lose sight of the end goal of the project. We ensured that the meetings did not last forever.
4. Leverage a project management tool — we tracked the progress using Asana. It made planning, assigning and tracking tasks conveniently.
5. Hold everyone accountable — it is important that everyone in the team owns his or her individual tasks end-to-end and delivers. There has to be a co-owned prioritization of work so that everyone voices one’s opinion, agrees upon the plan and owns the outcome.
6. Create a conducive environment — when we have a mix of introverts and extroverts it is imperative to involve everyone. The focus should be to listen to everyone, encourage feedback and hone talent. Empowered teams help boost interest and facilitate decision making.
7. Celebrate even the smallest of milestones — it is important to keep rewarding the right behaviors, appreciating the contributions made and having fun with the team members.
I hope this gives you some direction to sculpt your teams into a more efficient one. Stay tuned to learn more about my experiences and work done in the analytics domain.
