What I Learnt About Teamwork Through Working Alone
I always thought I preferred working solo, but my internship with GovTech has changed my mind.
I’m sure many of us can relate to the dread of working in teams for school or other projects, especially when you don’t know your teammates-to-be beforehand. More often than not, we experience difficult members in teams, which may, over repeated exposure, lead us to believe that working individually is more efficient. After all, if you remove the hassle of dealing with people, you’ll have more time to focus on the work itself, right?
So, imagine my delight when I was informed that I would be working alone on assigned projects during my 8-month internship, within the Smart City Technology Division (SCTD) of GovTech. This arrangement was, in reality, due to the specialised focus of my work: radar technology. There weren’t many people working in this area. I applied for the role of R&D Engineer, as it aligned with my experience in the Internet of Things (IoT), which I gained through my computing science degree at the Singapore Institute of Technology.
Although I was excited to work alone, I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to witness how an actual DevOps team functions in the workplace — I am a software engineer by training, after all. Thankfully, I was kindly “adopted” by the Sensei team at SCTD, and joined them for their weekly sprint updates and retrospectives, to get a feel for how Agile development is practiced in a professional setting. I also aligned my work to follow their sprint timelines.
This experience unexpectedly gave me a first-row seat to two contrasting dynamics— solo work, and one of the most high-functioning and well oiled teams I’ve seen.
Here’s what I learnt about teams and teamwork, through working on my assigned projects and witnessing how the Sensei team operates.
There was a steep learning curve when I embarked on exploring the development of a contactless blood pressure estimation system, using radar modules.
Given my background in computing science, not engineering, I needed some time to understand concepts related to various radar technologies, electromagnetic waves, signal processing, radio propagation, and more.
This zealous attempt at learning the basics of radar technology and simultaneously developing software as I go, led me to my first learning point:
1. Teams of varied skillsets provide unmatched performance
No matter how much time I would have spent on learning about radar technology throughout my 8-month internship, I can confidently say that my output would be nowhere near what I could produce if I were to work closely with an engineer instead. It’s not a matter of learning ability, but of the return on investment from the effort spent learning.
My time invested in learning about radar technology reaped a beginner-level understanding of it, whereas, in the same amount of time, an engineer with related experience could have achieved a more advanced level of expertise on the subject. With this project and its research-and-development nature, an advanced proficiency is exponentially more useful to creating a solution than a beginner or intermediate level.
Previously, I would have jumped to work on such a project alone because I want to pick up as many new skills as possible. However, now I see that in a result-driven environment such as a workplace it is more preferable to work in a team with members that possess the skills that complement what I lack, due to the increased productivity. The aspiring polymath in me can save her eagerness to expand her skill set for personal projects instead.
2. Teamwork can be pleasant and highly collaborative
During weekly progress update meetings, the Sensei team often goes through each member’s achievements over the past week, issues they are resolving, and what they learnt through roadblocks they overcame.
This fosters an environment where tacit knowledge is frequently shared, and allows the team to know who to approach for help on specific challenges they may face.
Additionally, the team gives undivided attention to each member’s sharing, and often pitches in to give feedback, offer help, or initiate a discussion to better suggest ideas on how a new problem may be resolved.
There is a sense of non-competition and genuine camaraderie between members in the Sensei team, which makes teamwork a breeze. This doesn’t come passively though, which leads to my next point.
3. The importance of team-building and effective leadership
Such a well-functioning team does not “happen” by accident. The Sensei team’s dynamic is a culmination of an empathetic leader, a continuous and conscious effort to build or strengthen relationships within the team, and careful selection of new team members.
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” Similarly, the ability to successfully practice empathetic leadership depends on both a leader determined to nurture an environment conducive for empathetic leadership, and a team that sees its value and contributes to nurturing such an environment as well.
I was amazed to find that the Sensei team had successfully built an oasis for empathetic leadership. Team members are comfortable with sharing difficulties faced, curiosity and enthusiasm are encouraged, compassion is displayed by each member, radical candor is led by example, and camaraderie is fostered. All this inadvertently boosts the team’s productivity, as feedback and help is frequently offered, members feel comfortable seeking advice or assistance when required, and they know exactly who to approach for help on specific problems.
How it’s practiced
It may sound like a lot of work to nurture such an environment, and I suspect it may have been at the beginning, but at this stage, it’s sustained through continuous and conscious team-building effort. This comes in the form of weekly sharing sessions, a monthly team lunch, ad-hoc team bonding events, as well as one-on-one meetings between the team’s leader and each member.
During the weekly lunchtime sessions, one team member (appointed through rotation) has the opportunity to share a video or talk about a topic that is of personal interest. Participating in this allowed me to discover unique interests that each team member held, and could build camaraderie with team members by starting a conversation on the interests they shared.
Monthly team lunches and ad-hoc team bonding events provided a more relaxed environment for team members to mix with those they may not work directly with, or to have casual conversations with the team leader outside of the professional setting. Such events enabled me to connect with everyone in the team individually in an organic manner, which I appreciated.
One-on-one meetings allow each member on the team to share their concerns, interests, aspirations and more with the team leader, allowing for better alignment of managerial decisions with team interests, and provides an avenue for mentorship.
Lastly, in an unspoken but continuous effort, during each meeting, team members actively listen and do not interrupt. Though it may seem trivial, this was one of the most prominent things I picked up on when I first joined the team, and it immediately sent a strong signal on the team’s values.
Never would I have expected that one of my most memorable takeaways from this internship would be on teamwork, especially when I worked alone on my projects throughout the internship. I am deeply grateful to walk away from this internship with a deepened understanding of teamwork and leadership, as well as a more nuanced take on Agile project management, on top of newfound technical skills such as radar signal processing, data analysis, web application development, and automation.
