You Should Never Walk Alone
It is easy to believe that as an intelligent person, you can and should take on the world all by yourself. It is easy to believe but doesn’t mean you should, because no one can and should walk alone. A brilliant product designer will always be reliant on engineers, marketing team and sales, etc to birth a finished acceptable product. Hence these individuals will need to come together to form a team and work.
A wise woman once wrote that the main soul of a team is reaching the goal(s) via the united input of its members with their unique strengths. A good team recognizes the importance of combined efforts in realizing the aims and objectives of any mission. To a large extent, how successful a person becomes when they grow up is dependent on their ability to thrive in teams. Collaboration gives active participants an edge because consciously or subconsciously, they pick on and absorb some of the expertise of their mates. This indirectly improves their approach to analyzing and tackling related issues when they come up.
Getting people to work together as a team goes beyond a group of five people casually doing their bits to form a unit. If this was only the case without any form of intentionality and structure, the task of interest might turn out to be an absolute catastrophe. The relationship between the teammates might also be affected.
To get started on any task at all, individual or group, parameters must be identified and expected outcome clearly defined. To help with these are answers to the 5 Ws and H of the assignment– Who, What, Why, Where, When, and How? This template has been saving lives for years. It is very simple and makes everything easier.
An ideal team needs more than just people with the right skill set to be effective. Teammates need to have a relationship and where there has been no history It is best to have people who get along to work together but we can’t always have it easy. According to Dana Brownlee, the following are tactics that help foster healthy relationships among team members.
- Build Relationships Early
Build *good relationships early, i.e., even before you have to work together with people. Happy hours, common interests, and stories shared are some ways to do this. I know I loosened up a bit around my boss after he shared the story of his early career days because it was one I could relate with.
Existing reports, good or bad, affect the quality of engagement among teammates. With a good interaction history, teammates become easily more open about their struggles, ready to assist others, and generally more friendly. I’ve seen how work is affected by mean faces, so these prosocial behaviours from members of the team go a long way to make things better and conflicts (inevitable) are easily resolved.
- Develop Ground Rules
While there might be the assumption that people should know how to act during serious activities, ground rules should still be explicitly made known to every member of the group again to refresh memories. Rules guide and shape how the group activities are conducted. To avoid unnecessary exacerbation of conflicts that may arise, every team should have laid out ground rules that the teammates are aware of
- Identify Preferred Means of Communication
There will be absolutely nothing without communication. For one reason or the other, everyone has a communication channel they wish people would always reach them on for different concerns — could be email for work, phone calls for emergency and texts for personal non pressing matters like “have you eaten?”.
Member A prefers phone calls, B would rather get texts than calls, while C loves the very professional emails. Pay attention and know each person’s preferences. As long as they are just as responsive, relate with them the way they would like you to.
Adopting these tactics will help team members be more proactive in their dealings with little or no supervision. This significantly reduces misunderstandings and other interpersonal conflicts that can arise.
