Be a better cross functional team member, with these 5 ways to build your confidence
We often hear about organisations which have helped bring different teams together by creating shared objectives. But how can you actually do that and what does it mean for the people involved when you do?
Different teams have different measures of success
In a large medical research charity, the science research team are going to care about the last 0.000001% of detail. That is what the scientific method is designed to investigate. In that same organisation, the marketing team are more likely to make decisions based on 40%:60% type of certainty. For them, the speed of movement is more important than the absolute certainty of being correct.
Both of these ways of working are correct for the individual teams to do their jobs in isolation. The problems arise when you try to get these teams to work together. If you don’t actively tackle this problem, it will derail any project or product in which you need the groups to work together effectively.
Shared goals are an outcome of trust, not the way to get there
Shared measures of success feel like a great solution for this kind of challenge. When you have them, it means that you can make decisions based on the same foundations, prioritise effectively and generally work more efficiently.
Gone are the days of constant meetings about roles and responsibilities and you can focus on creating a great product that adds value to your users and your organisation.
To get to this point, there is a lot of ground work that needs to be done most likely over a long period of time. Rather than being the solution to the problem of integration, they are really an outcome of the work that’s been done to get different groups of people to understand, empathise, respect and trust one another.
Shared goals make it harder to see the value you add
When you are working in your own team with measures of success that are directly related to your work, it’s easy to see the value you add. If you’re a digital delivery team, if you get something shipped then success is yours. You can see the thing you made and how it’s directly related to your skills and activity. This is a highly validating experience that everyone needs at some point.
When working with shared goals, this direct validation is less likely to come.
An example: We have recently completed a piece of work for the NSPCC policy team — looking to convince the Digital Minister Matt Hancock MP to be tougher on regulation for children on social networks. The culmination of this was the NSPCC ‘Wild West Web’ campaign:
Matt Hancock MP has recently decided to bring forward a white paper on the subject and has stated publicly that he’s keen to end the ‘Wild West’ of the web. This is an undoubted success for the NSPCC and the campaign:
“We have to address the wild west elements of the internet through legislation, in a way that supports innovation.”
Our role in this success was small. The team at the NSPCC came up with the concept, we simply delivered on it with some strong creative.
This does not mean that our value was insignificant, but it does mean that it’s harder to directly relate to the outcomes that have been achieved. Involved are dozens of people, all of whom did their job well to achieve this goal.
Magic teams need individuals to be confident in their role
The magic of teams is that they can achieve things individuals cannot. However the risk is that they leave individuals feeling undervalued as they can’t point to the direct outcome of their actions.
The way out of this, is for individuals to take responsibility for building confidence in their own skills and outputs.
If you speak to any high performing sports team, this is the framework that they place all of this in: each individual has their job, they understand it and work hard on doing it well — team success comes from here.
5 ways to build confidence in your skills to be a better team member
It’s all well and good saying you need to build confidence in your own abilities to work well in a team, but what practical steps can you take to do this? Here are a few things that i’ve seen work well:
1. Become a student of what you do and find people that have done it before you
We often stop studying once we come out of university. Whilst we keep learning through our experience, this often makes us realise how little we know rather than build confidence in what we do! To combat this keep studying your discipline — look at what others are doing, read academic materials and discuss them.
There’s almost no situation that you’re facing which hasn’t been looked at before. Whether you’re struggling with moving from a specialist role to a generalist management position or can’t get an efficient innovation process into your organisation, there’ll be someone who has been through it previously.
Even more effective, is to study how other professions, contexts or groups of people have approached a problem you may be facing in your own world.
2. Study information with a critical eye
At the heart of most Masters programmes, is the practice of critical thinking. This is the skill to look at a piece of information, imagine the context surrounding it and come to your own conclusions.
So when you look at that latest agency blog post, think about what the agenda is of the person writing it. When you next see a conference talk, explore what is different in between that person’s context and your own.
Essentially, don’t just absorb information — look at it with a discerning inquisition. This helps you to understand what you know and what other people know, rather than taking everything as read.
3. Set up an action learning set
For me, sitting in a room with a small group of people with a similar context to my own but a distinct distance between our roles, is my best way to learn. By discussing information, experiences and content you can each learn from one another’s perspectives and further rationalise your own thinking.
There’s a huge amount to be gained by getting someone to help you facilitate this conversation and to hold you each to account over the actions you’re taking.
4. Write write write to learn what you think
I never understood the value of writing before I did my post grad work with Roffey Park. Now I am a huge proponent of it as a learning and confidence building technique.
As humans, we are incredibly skilled at holding contradictory concepts in our heads. We can know that we support donations to help individual people, but get annoyed with the guys that bother us at our pub table asking for a handout. We can be driving for digital change in all parts of our working life, but still like the feel of a book in our hand at home.
(FastCompany have a great article on the biology behind this if you want more info — https://www.fastcompany.com/3067169/how-your-brain-makes-you-hold-contradictory-beliefs)
However, when we write things down, the process forces us to face these contradictory thoughts head on. Then the black and whiteness of the words on a page, mean we need to rationalise these ideas into a more coherent narrative. We are forced to work out what we really mean, think and believe.
Every page you write, is a way to bookmark and set it stone what you think. I’ve found nothing that helps build understanding and confidence in my own beliefs more effectively.
5. Build a culture of psychological safety in your team
Google’s project Aristotle was a study to find what made some of their teams outperform others. The finding was that the most proactive, innovative and successful teams possessed a feeling that no matter what, their team members would have their back.
Patrick Lencioni described this same situation with his 5 ‘Dysfunctions of teams’ — http://www.fivebehaviors.com/About.aspx
Edgar Schein said that culture is ‘what it’s ok to assume’. This culture Psychological Safety does not come about overnight. It comes from how people react in particular situations and the precedents which are set in these moments.
Culture is ‘what it’s ok to assume’ — Edgar Schein
You can help everyone in your team by being kind, empathising with their perspective and supporting them when necessary. Avoid blaming one another when something goes wrong and instead focus on what needs to happen next. This doesn’t mean you need to ignore the frustration of what’s happened, but don’t wallow in it — get to next steps as quickly as possible.
None of this is easy. It takes more time and is more complicated than cracking on down your own path working to your own measures of success. However, if you want to drive real change or achieve real results working across lots of teams, the best place to start is to take responsibility for your own actions.
