What’s that smell?
The scent of making, helping, trying, and occasionally failing is in the air.
Here’s an open secret: teamwork is really f’ing hard.
As a company that makes team collaboration tools, we spend a lot of time musing about how powerful teams are in the abstract. But viewed up close, teamwork is messy.
Coordinating everyone’s schedules never goes exactly as planned, and we end up with bottlenecks. Different people have different goals — or their performance might even be measured by different yardsticks — and we end up with conflicting priorities.
Mix in bureaucracy, distribution across time zones, and a dash of “because we’ve always done it this way”, and voilà! Collaboration cluster.
Then there’s the diversity paradox: the reality that variety of skills, ages, and backgrounds makes for higher-performing teams, while simultaneously making the interpersonal dynamics less comfortable. In other words, navigating different personalities and problem solving styles is the tax we pay on having the right people in the room.
This is not a bad thing, though. The discomfort prompts us to be better listeners and more mindful collaborators, which is what allows all the benefits of diversity to shine through. So it’s a tax worth paying for both ethical and bottom-line reasons. But let’s be real. It exists.
All these factors conspire to create head-banging levels of frustration on occasion (if not on the regular). In fact, research indicates a sizable majority of knowledge workers feel their team is dysfunctional in one way or another. It’s demoralizing, and makes reaching our full potential that much harder.
It’s all about your ground game
Yep, there are fancy collaboration tools designed to make teamwork easier. And yep, we make a whole portfolio of them. But ask anyone at Atlassian, and they’ll tell you that what a team does outside of the tools is most important. The culture. The vibe. The habits and patterns.
Tools are worthless without the right people, principles, and practices in place.
You can roll out HipChat and Slack and Basecamp and Skype. But if people are incentivized to hoard information, then hoard they will. You can have a beautifully groomed agile board. But that doesn’t mean you’re actually nimble.
As a company with offices in eight time zones employing almost 2000 people hailing from who-knows-how-many countries, we know the messiness of teamwork as well as anyone. It causes too much noise, and doesn’t let enough signal come through. So we’re doing something about it.
Like most tech companies, we run structured experiments on our products. But we also run ad-hoc experiments on ourselves. We tinker with different practices in an effort to work better together. When something works for one team, we share it with other teams so they can try it, iterate on it, and improve it.
It’s worth getting teams right
What people can accomplish when they work together is amazing. Teams at CSIRO, Australia’s national science foundation, are turning ocean waves into kilowatts. Teams at Kiva are facilitating micro-loans for entrepreneurs in developing countries. Teams at Airbnb are turning the hospitality industry upside down.
It’s not about the “lone genius” any more. Or maybe it never has been. When you think about it, Neil Armstrong didn’t land on the moon. NASA landed on the moon.
Granted, most of us aren’t working on the next moonshot. We’re working on the incremental changes that move humanity forward. Which is every bit as noble.
Teamwork isn’t going away
In fact, it’s only becoming more important. The problems we’re solving at work these days are too complex to be tackled by one person. It takes a team. Teams of teams, really.
Any job that is repetitive and/or operational is likely to be automated within the next 15 years. It’s the collaborative jobs, jobs that require social skills, that will be hard to replace with robots.
The future of work is teamwork. Which means we’d better figure out how to un-cluster it. And fast.
That’s why we launched this publication
First up, a few stories about decision making. One team was getting stuck in “analysis paralysis” until they started putting a framework around how they make them. Another team thought they were doing just fine until a self-assessment exercise prompted them to make some changes to their decision-making process. And our editor-in-chief explains why she decided to go back to being an individual contributor after a couple years in management.
We’ve got loads more stories to share in the coming weeks and months. Battle-tested collaboration hacks for meetings, working with remote teammates, giving and getting feedback, problem framing, forming new teams, and other areas of collaboration quicksand.
Join us on our quest to make teamwork work. We’ll share what our teams are doing to solve little pieces of the equation. Their successes, failures… warts n’ all. And if you try any of these ideas yourself, let us know how it goes, wouldya? Let’s figure this thing out together as one big, extended team.
So what is that smell, anyway?
We’re definitely catching a whiff of something in the air. Equal parts inspiration, perspiration, aspiration, and determination. It smells like hope. And that, friends, is the smell of team spirit.
–Sarah Goff-Dupont, Jamey Austin, and Natalie Mendes, Editors of “Smells Like Team Spirit”
P.s.: You’ll find references to the Atlassian Team Playbook and a number of its plays in our stories. Check out the Team Playbook directly using the link above, or head on over to our sister publication, Designing Atlassian, for a Playbook primer.
