How We Maintain The Teamwork — Our Team Dynamic
Working as team, bringing different challenges than working alone. Working environment, different culture, different behavior can be something that make our team more diverse and fun, but sometime it can be a challenge in a way. And how to turn all the differences between team members into something that will actually? Well the answer is simple, synchronize the team dynamic
What are Team Dynamics?
Social psychologist Kurt Lewin first described team dynamics in 1939. He saw it as the process of understanding the abilities of the people that make up a team. In addition to exploring their behavior, Lewin recommended understanding the reasons for that behavior, so that it was easier to orchestrate a positive outcome.
Today, we see team dynamics as psychological factors that affect the direction of a team’s performance. The dynamics are created by the people involved and how they interact with one another on all levels, including:
- Verbal and nonverbal exchanges
- Written correspondence
- Performance on shared tasks
Team dynamics are also impacted by company culture and structure and the upper management’s leadership style, but the strongest influences come from within the group itself.
The researchers found that the successful team was committed to shared goals and enjoyed a synergistic team environment. The dysfunctional team had members that were content to put in minimal effort and were highly competitive with one another.
The message was clear: if a team didn’t have a ‘one for all and all for one’ philosophy, it couldn’t succeed. The next section explains how teams are developed and how their dynamics affect performance.
5 Stages of Team Development
In 1965 psychologist Bruce Tuckman identified five stages of development that teams go through, from formation to project conclusion. Below is a list of these stages along with behaviors that are typical for each one.
- Forming. This stage is where team development begins. Interactions tend to be friendly but cautious as everyone gets to know one another. While the project will be a regular source of discussion as the manager explains its objectives and how to achieve them, the emphasis is on building a sense of community and preparing to work together.
- Storming. The storming phase is one of the most critical stages of team development. This is where the risk of conflict goes up because members are now confident enough to disagree with one another (sometimes strongly). With project teams, the manager’s goal is to get everyone on the same page and prevent some members from imposing their goals and opinions on others.
- Norming. Now that everyone on the team understands one another’s strengths and weaknesses, they focus on working together. Project hierarchies are created at this stage so that everyone knows who they are reporting to and who they may be managing. The emphasis shifts from team building to project completion.
- Performing. If you are the project manager, this stage is where you delegate tasks and accord team members more independence. Bringing new members or removing existing ones won’t have an appreciable impact on team dynamics unless the additions or subtractions involve a significant percentage of the original team.
- Adjourning. This stage is the last one in the team development cycle. The project has been completed and its members prepare to assume different responsibilities and work with other teams.
How We Build Team Dynamics?
When we are told to form a group for this course, I immediately think of people that are: good friends but also professional when it comes to work, doesn’t need to be a high-skilled people to code or design, but the most important is people that I’m comfortable to work with. And finally we form a group consist of Me, Khalis Murfid, Janitra Ariena, Darin Amanda, and Yafonia Kristiani, named PleasePleaseLulus after our course’s acronym PPL. And beside the fact that we are good friends here are some steps to set the stage for a positive outcome
Define Roles and Responsibilities
When our group decide to choose mobile app, more precisely both native Android and iOS, we first define: Who’s gonna develop the Android app and who’s gonna develop the iOS app. After some discussion, we decided that we’re gonna “divide” our group become two small group, The Android team that consist of Me, Janitra, and Darin and iOS team that consist of Khalis Murfid and Yafonia Kristiani. We also assign specific responsibility for each team, I personally responsible to write code that has to do with Model and Controller, and also setting-up Java environment for testing with Jacoco, apply linter, and I also responsible to write YAML script for our automated CI using gitlab, integrating Sonarqube, and also setting up an AWS VPC as our gitlab runner (since the shared runner are so slow).
Encourage Open Communication
To make ourselves even more comfortable with each other, We make sure to be more open with each other. We’ve done some way to achieve it, like at the beginning of our team forming, we were doing a team building to strengthen our bond by singing in karaoke. And this is how we come up with our ‘slogan’ “Bukan Bintang Biasa” when we sing a song by them, which is an Indonesia music group form early 2000’s that consist of three girls and two boys, just like us. And we also have done a several sharing session each other to make our bond even better
Stop Problems Quickly
If you see any signs of poor dynamics, such as one member verbally overpowering everyone else or two members failing to get along, it is important to act quickly to rectify things and prevent the negative attitude from spreading. Provide the team members in question with honest but supportive feedback about their actions and offer a positive and healthy solution.
Conclusion
When you want to build a successful team, the first step is to assemble a group of employees with the right mix of expertise and knowledge. That’s the easiest part. Then you get to know everyone’s personalities and create a collaborative environment where everyone can flourish.
The strongest team dynamics happen when everyone trusts one another, holds one another accountable in a respectful manner and is willing to work collectively. Because the best team is not a team filled with highly skilled people but the best team is one that are full of joy but can be damn serious when needed. Cheers!
