Micro-habits of effective teams
More diverse perspectives create better solutions
Real collaboration is the ability to bring lots of different points of view together to create new ideas that none of those viewpoints would have made by themselves.
This is all good in theory — but in practice is incredibly difficult to make happen.
In reality, you have power differentials between people that mean they don’t feel safe to provide their honest, open perspective. In most teams you get a tendency towards solutions that a single person or small group of people value based on their experience and opinions.
The term psychological safety describes the situation when this isn’t true. When everyone feels empowered to voice their perspective and for it to be genuinely heard by others. It usually happens when power is equalised between people to a large degree.
These teams still often have people that make decisions on behalf of the collective, but everyone feeds into these in an equal way.
At William Joseph we are growing our team more than we ever thought possible. We are also doing so in a remote working model. So how do we ensure the psychological safety that we had when there were 5 of us in a room above a Burger & Lobster, translates to when there are 15 of us, many of whom have never been in the same room as each other?
Some things that we think might help:
1. Leave your ego at the door
One of the most common differences in power is related to experience. People who have it are often perceived as knowing all the answers. In truth, there is a huge amount of value from experience. You see patterns that people looking at a particular type of problem for the first time simply won’t perceive.
However everyone who is really experienced, knows that a fresh pair of eyes on a problem is just as valuable. But it’s down to those with power / experience to show people that it’s ok to assume they can make suggestions without being made to look silly.
To do this, you need to leave your ego at the door. You need to feel confident enough to know that new suggestions aren’t challenging your perspective, but trying to build on it. It’s only individuals that can do this for themselves — it’s our responsibility to take whatever steps are needed to make us ok.
Ego ultimately breeds disrespect for opinions and experiences that are different from one’s own. I’ve been on teams where I barely know what’s going on yet was able to contribute because my questions weren’t met with eye rolls.
2. Demonstrate humility constantly
There is a story in rugby circles, about how one of the best players in the world is always the one who cleans up the dressing rooms after their team plays. They were a Kiwi so it’s often known as ‘sweeping the sheds’.
There are a million things to say about the example this sets to their team. However for me, the most important thing is that it addresses that power differential. Through their humility, they were saying to the rest of the team that you can always come to me because I’m doing the menial tasks as well as the big, exciting, glamorous work.
Everyone in an effective team should be showing that they’re open to hearing ideas. This can be hard to do — and you might fail as much as you succeed, but try and talk about it if nothing else.
What to avoid:
- Shutting off discussions without everyone contributing
- Getting annoyed at people for making suggestions or changes
- Only discussing decisions in the same small groups
- Giving only certain people the ability to make decisions
3. Share by default
The more we understand then the more we can empathise with people. If we can imagine how someone is feeling, then we can respect that point of view (even if we disagree) and eventually build trust.
The foundation of trust comes from everyone knowing the same information. In many organisations this can be uncomfortable, but knowledge is power and if some people have more knowledge than others, then you create power imbalances which are the enemy of collaboration.
A quick win for any team is to set up a way to share work as it’s progressing. If you use Slack, this can be a channel that’s dedicated to getting things out to the whole team, no matter who is working on them.
Key to making this work is to again remove your ego so you don’t only share things that are finished. (If you are on Slack, use the excellent Reacji Channeler to fire a message into a channel at the click of a button)
At William Joseph, we also have a daily catch up where current design tasks are shared and discussed — providing more visibility for the whole team about that process, demystifying it as we go.
Doing design catch ups demystifies aspects of the design process and allows those in other roles like Product Management or User Experience to feed in more readily
4. Catch up on non-work stuff regularly
They can be awkward, but sessions where you share things about ourselves help us to see each other as people, rather than just colleagues. These need to be created at scale for any team.
Your daily stand ups or team weekly sessions should be as much about this as they are the actual work you’re delivering together. These aren’t the only ways to do this — look at other channels such as one pagers or non-work Slack channels that some people might find easier to contribute to than an ad-hoc conversation.
5. Be curious about all the things
If you can signal to people you’re always looking for interesting things, then everyone is more likely to bring up new ideas. Share interesting cultural experiences or the latest news from the world you work in or even wider.
The more conversations you can spin up then the more you will understand and explore together and the closer your relationships will become.
6. Understand yourself and others
By knowing more about how you tick, you can understand how others might also perceive the world. From here, you can get better at engaging with differing viewpoints — being empathetic to their needs.
The more you know about yourself, the more you’ll know how you come across to other people.
If you are a loud, confident white man, then understand how that can be intimidating for some people to engage with. You may want to tone things down in person or engage in different channels where you take up less space (this is one of the best things about Zoom calls and Slack!!).
