Highly collaborative environment
You are leading a new team of eight developers. The team is trained in Scrum and uses collaboration tools for sprint backlog, version control and continuous integration. They are collocated but there is little interaction between them. They work within their area of responsibility — business analyst, developer, quality engineer — and communicate via messaging app. Over the last three retrospective sessions, they highlighted issues of duplicated work, violation of code standards and unnecessary work dependencies.
The team members are technically strong, motivated and smart. They highlighted communication problem and suggested additional processes and tracking tools to improve the communication. They resolved these issues but similar issues occur whenever different people are involved or different components are developed. So the team continues to add more processes to aid communication for the lack of better solution.
The underlying cause of such recurring communication problem is often a collaboration problem because all teams go through the forming-storming phase like this and this, to become real teams. Unfortunately, team members work as a collection of individuals and not as a real team during this phase. From experience, this phase takes at least a year and in the worst case, some teams are perpetually stuck in this phase, especially when left on their own.
Do not mistake cooperating and coordinating as collaboration.
I believe the best time to handle collaboration problems is before they become collaboration problems. This means building a highly collaborative environment that cushions people against the knocks of different perspectives and interests.
Before we get started on how to build a highly collaborative environment, let us examine the mechanics of collaboration.
Collaboration is defined as working with others to do a task and to achieve shared goals. But reality often shows there is no shared goal, only perceived shared goal. Perceived shared goal equals shared goal only when there is empathy between people. Without empathy, individuals are merely talking past each other, without understanding each other’s perspective, interests and motives. No empathy means no collaboration, period.
Studies have shown that people are hard-wired to empathize with people who are similar
Start with special interest groups to improve the overall empathy level in the organization. Special interest groups such as chapter and guild, sports group and meetup bring people with common interests together and encourages pro-social behavior, such as voluntary sharing of knowledge and experience in an organization.
Pro-social behavior is the voluntary behavior intended to benefit other people such as helping, sharing, donating, co-operating, and volunteering. Pro-social behavior improves working relationship with kindness and generosity, and has a viral effect on people.
Pro-social behavior also creates positive shared experience which further improves empathy between people. With empathy, collaboration becomes possible, which in turn creates more shared experience and form a virtuous cycle of empathy and collaboration.
Hope this helps. May your team overcome the forming-storming phase and emerge as a real team!
If you enjoyed this piece, you might like to know programming is a team sport.
Cheers! :)
