How to Overcome the Team Barrier [Part 2]

This is a continuation of my previous article, which discussed how interdisciplinary teams are essential for innovation and how to make them more effective. Team dynamics is a critical component for the success of any project, but, is often overlooked. Picking up all ‘A Players’ from different departments and putting them together is often not the best bet! A host of other factors play a big role in success or failure. Being prepared by understanding where things might go wrong and how to deal with them can be an excellent start to a powerful team.

I had previously talked about the role of ‘Varied Leadership’ and a ‘Supportive Team’ on team dynamics. For the scope of this article, I would go deeper on this topic with an emphasis on ‘Cultural Disparities and Communication Barriers’, ‘Clarity of Vision’ and the ‘Right Mix of Skills’.

3. Cultural Disparities and Communication Barriers

As organizations become more global, it is highly likely for people from different countries and cultures to be on the same team. Such teams are formed to offer the best functional expertise from around the world, combined with deep, local knowledge of the most promising markets. They draw on the benefits of international diversity, bringing together people from many cultures with varied work experiences and different perspectives on strategic and organizational challenges. All this helps multinational companies compete in the current business environment.

But such teams are up against stiff challenges. Creating successful work groups is extremely hard because differences in working style, native language, work ethics and the idea of success can cause communication to rapidly deteriorate, misunderstanding to ensue, and cause cooperation to degenerate into distrust.

How to deal with it: Everyone brings something to the table and the first step should be to acknowledge this fact and respect the differences. Holding team lunches and engaging in conversations outside of work is a good informal way to build trust. For instance, American and Indian colleagues discussing similarities and differences between Baseball and Cricket, a person from China bringing in Kung Pao Chicken to share with teammates and after-hours traditional music sessions can be some fun ways to build a more accepting culture. In addition to that, although there are quite a lot of stereotypes for working style and ethics based on where someone comes from, keeping an open mind and asking a lot of questions instead of coming in with preconceived notions is how all team members should be trained to act.

Moving on to communication barriers, all team members should be guided by these three principles to ensure that influence on decisions is not dictated by fluency in the chosen “common” language

Rules of Engagement for Team Meetings

Only when people develop a mutual trust and a sense of kinship, can they embrace and practice the kind of innovative, respectful, and groundbreaking interactions that drive the best ideas forward.

4. Clarity of Vision

When teams dive straight into the project without holding a good discussion about the project vision, personal goals and expectations, productive hours are lost because members tend to work in different directions. The best way to tackle this situation is by having a preliminary meeting, outlining the project vision in terms of the objective, scope, deliverables, and milestones. In addition to that, having a conversation about how each person sees themselves contributing to the project, what they expect to learn through the course of it and what kind of outcomes they expect from the project is vital to bring everyone on the same page. When a consensus is reached, document it, distribute it and constantly improve upon it to best reflect the overarching goal. Any feedback which helps the team learn and realign the path should be welcomed!

5. Right Mix of Skills

Research suggests that when everyone on the team has similar academic or professional experience, although they can perform efficiently in functional tasks, often fail when originality and innovation are being pursued. This happens mainly because each member’s approach to problem-solving is usually similar owing to deep conditioning by standard industry practices.

Although they find it easier to collaborate with peers from similar backgrounds, it gets them siloed, making it difficult to see the broader perspective and provide unbiased answers to — Where does the company stand in the marketplace? What pains are being alleviated for the end-user? Can we directly apply or get inspiration from industries completely unrelated to our business?

As an example, a recent medical innovation for assisting difficult births — successfully tested in South America and recently licensed by Becton Dickinson — was a brainchild of an Argentinian car mechanic, Jorge Odon. Enthralled by a YouTube video on using a plastic bag to retrieve a cork from the inside of an empty wine bottle, he realized that the same principle can be used to save a baby stuck in a birth canal. An obstetrician would have tried to improve the forceps or the vacuum extractor, but the mechanic’s unconventional approach helped solve obstructed labor.

Now, how might we replicate such serendipitous occurrences?

I suggest that a good way to combine the effectiveness of functionally strong teams and creatively strong teams is by utilizing them at different phases of the product cycle.

This topic is especially important for leaders in technology because technology is outpacing our ability as humans to adapt to and humanize it, and a lack of diversity in product development exacerbates this problem. The next phase of technology innovation will be fueled by product teams who are capable of empathizing with and understanding diverse problem-solving frameworks. These teams will realize that one of the best ways to experience diverse problem-solving frameworks is to be around people who are by way of race, gender, age, sexuality or work experience, looking at the world through a fundamentally different lens than they are.

Transformation-capable teams comprise of people who are not only high performers, but those who maintain a unique balance of skills and mindsets that allow them to sustain focus, agility, and optimism in the face of uncertainty for prolonged periods of time.

If we want to build products and services that the whole world wants to use, diversity in thinking is a strategic competitive advantage and product organizations that get this right will build the next generation of meaningful experiences.

Closing note

I am a student of Product Development at Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovation Institute and all the thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are developed through my personal experiences and research.

If you found this article helpful, please feel free to like and share, make suggestions for helpful resources that I missed in the comments, and reach out to me on LinkedIn!