What Makes The ‘Perfect Team’ And How We Built Our Own
A couple of years ago I and the rest of bambuu (back then we were just a study group at the university), stumbled upon a very simple yet very effective tool that has helped us improve our efficiency as a team. We started doing what we now call retrospective — a biweekly one hour session, where we talk through a few predefined topics. In this article I will elaborate on what this approach does for us, and why I think we are getting more effective as a team. Last but not least, I’ll give some examples on how we do retrospectives.
Why we do it
Doing retrospectives has helped us create an environment where we can be ourselves at work. I know this sounds corny, but let’s look at the results from Google’s Project Aristotle before jumping to any conclusions.
The findings from Project Aristotle was released in 2016. Researches from Google analysed 180 teams to figure out what made the best teams, well… the best. At first, they looked for what many of us intuitively would thinks makes the difference, such as strong personal characters, good educational background and being good friends outside work. But they realised that none of these things mattered much. Fast forward and they ended up with the conclusion that the defining pattern was what they call psychological safety.
The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another — NYTimes, ‘What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team’
In short — the best teams have a group norm that allows the team members to express how they feel, so they don’t have to put on a facade when going to work. Furthermore it facilitates an environment where you step out of your comfort zone, because you dare to fail or say what people don’t want to hear. Many of us have experienced there situation where a manager or a boss makes bad decision without anyone speaking up, even though multiple people at the time knew it was a poor decision, but carried it out anyway wasting energy, time and money.
Changing this kind of culture doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time and effort. If we simplify the process of changing a culture, first the team needs to agree on a new cultural direction. Second, they have to repeatedly perform the right actions in order to nurture this culture. Doing retrospectives can help you with the second part.
How we do it
As mentioned earlier, we started doing these retrospectives at the university where we spent roughly an hour (sometimes more) every week talking through some predefined topics. Today we do it biweekly but the structure is the same. The topics are chosen to match how our everyday life looks like. Currently our topics looks like this:
🐳 General
👥 Our Social Interaction
💻 Design & Development
💸 Business
🎩 Specific Projects That We Are Working On
We go through them all starting at the top. First, we read the notes from the previous retrospective, to evaluate what we talked about last time e.g. “have we addressed issue X?” or “is Y still something we need to focus on?” Sometimes a discussion is deemed important, so we write it down again to make sure we discuss our progress again at the next retrospective. It could be: “We’re often burnt out two hours before leaving the office, maybe we should focus on taking more breaks in the afternoon”. When we’re done with the notes from the last retrospective we proceed to talk about what might have occurred since last time. After finishing a topic we proceed to the next and repeat the process again. It’s really that simple. Our experience is that what starts as formalised behavioural patterns in the retrospective gradually spread out into all the other aspects of our daily work life.
But since this article focusses on the culture that emerge with this practice I will try to elaborate a bit on the topic of Our Social Interaction.
This is where we can anticipate potential conflicts or misconceptions. It can be as simple as one person’s habits that may annoy other team members. One of us had a tendency to give a double pat on the back after giving feedback. Even though it was a genuinely meant as an encouragement, it was perceived as being arrogant by others. Talking about it can either give that person a chance to stop doing it, or explain why he's doing it. Sometimes there’s even a good intention or reason, and just knowing this can make is easier for others to tolerate it. In other cases one of us might be experiencing hard times at home, from conflicts with a partner to death in the near family. Being able to express one’s state of mind, and in some cases make room to talk more about these topic eg. over lunch, can make a big difference in how quickly and easily we can get back to a more normal workday.
We can’t always prevent or solve social conflicts in situ, so sometimes we need to talk about them afterwards, at the next retrospective. We might be having a discussion that started of well-informed, but ended with us acting like a bunch of spoiled kids from kindergarten, throwing bricks at each other from our cardboard forts. We use the retrospective to talk through these situations, where we try to locate how we got off track and what we could have done better. Talking through these situations reduces the amount of these inefficient discussions and sometimes we can even notice when we’re in the middle of one, to make the call to get back on track again.
Ocasioanally, someone’s just been an idiot, and needs to apologise, and having a culture where people take responsibility and don’t hold a grudge against you for your mistakes is priceless, and our retrospectives have really helped us to get there.
An added bonus we get from doing these retrospectives is that it helps us to regularly talk about subjects that we‘re not motivated to talk about. We love building products, but business strategy isn’t something that we intuitively talk about, so being forced to talk about it biweekly helps us not to neglect it.
Sum up
To summarise it all, the key to an effective team is a norm where we treat each other well. This can be cultivated through a weekly or biweekly retrospective, where predefined topics are talked through and evaluated.
If you have found this article’s view on teamwork interesting and wants to dive into similar minded literature I can recommend that you read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek.
My name is Silas Roswall I’m the lead designer, front-end developer and co-founder at bambuu where we mainly built apps and other cool stuff for companies. When I’m not looking at wireframes I sometimes post stuff my instagram profile and/or eat ice cream.
