Working together - teams and teamwork

In this note, teams are the same as groups. There are teams that are great and teams that aren’t. Hopefully, you encounter more of the former than the latter. Great teams are hard to find and usually they do not happen by accident. In university and after graduation, you will work on many teams. In some cases, you will join an existing team. You will get the chance to pick a team or you are given a team. Sometimes teams are suitable for the whole task. Other times, the team has to change as the work changes. A team member might have to leave and you may and you may not have a choice about the replacement. There are teams you will work with 8 hours a day for weeks and months full time, and there are other teams that you put a few hours toward on and off over a short or long period. There are lots and lots of things to think about regarding teams - form, structure, having the right team for the task.

Structure, topics, tasks, and roles

There should be one person ‘in charge’. Someone who will be accountable at the end of the day, in charge of the team’s product and direction/priorities. Not of all decisions, but ultimately accountable. With student teams, this does not really make sense, so you will have to pretend someone on the team is accountable and is the one ‘in charge’. You cannot have multiple ‘bosses’. Bosses do not make all decisions though - they have defined roles and scope.

Being a leader of team takes work and 'thinking'. Waterloo's Student Success Office has a student leadership program.

Risk management - understand what you do not know, identify the risks, and have a plan for how the team is going to handle risks known about and ones that might pop up.

Risk mitigation - try to deal with important risks in the team ASAP. Keep your most flexible problem sovler 'in reserve' with some spare capacity during the project so that they can help out when things go awry.

Change management is also important. Uncertainty and the unknown lead to changes in plans and activities.

Build good communication habits - be timely, concise, accurate.

Make sure some reasonable consistency is followed in the team with respect to format and style in writing, reports, etc. The team’s output should look like one person did it - not six different people.

Information sharing – letting each other know what is happening (or not happening) is critical, especially if it impacts what someone is doing or is expecting to do next.

Divide and delegate - can pair some tasks, but in reality, many of the tasks need to be done solo - figure out who can do what and get on with it.

Front-load teamwork - get started ASAP - you do not know what will happen. On any ‘long’ project, it is likely that someone will get sick, leave or be ‘borrowed’. If you have waited until the last minute to get underway, what will you do? Watch scope creep and get the key stuff done first before adding new ideas or requirements.

Have a regular face-to-face status update from each of the team members, make sure all of the team members know what the others are doing, what barriers there are, and what the expectations of each are - daily if needed.

Make sure each team member knows who is dependent on their current task, why they are dependent, and when it should be completed.

If something is going awry, there should be an early warning method - for example, you are 1/4 the way through the time, are you 1/4 through the task? 1/2 way? 3/4? Do not surprise your teammates or leader. Do not wait until you are 3/4 done or the end and say, ‘Oopsy, I will be a week late. My bad.’

Know what the critical path is for the team’s project.

Keep the team focused on the critical path - someone on the critical path should not be helping others or doing things not on the critical path - that person should also not be starved for work or blocked from completing work. Effort is not as important on a non-critical path activity or series of tasks will not delay the project. Not everything worth doing is worth doing right. A minute lost on the critical path is a minute lost for the whole project and team - unless you find a way to catch up. Usually this takes more resources, money and time to recover. Make sure that you have the right resources on the critical path and keep them there!

It usually takes the whole team to succeed and only one person to cause failure. Monitor and control for the weak link.

Always use ‘we’ in team work. There are few team activities where it is all about ‘one’. You did not do it alone. Drop the I, my, mine. Use us, ours, we. Even if you did the majority of the work and fixed things, you still are a team.

All teams have some personality conflict. Can be big or small. Some folks do not deliver on time or do not deliver good work. Some let the others do the work. You should be able to talk through small problems. Unfortunately, few options exist for fixing these problems if they are big. At university, talk to the instructor after trying to sort things out yourself. In all cases, learn a lesson and avoid working with people who have caused team problems again.

There are other kinds of conflict that arise from confusion, poor communication, different targets, expectations.

Do not pick team members because you like them, live with them, or follow them on social media. Pick team members based on the task and the ability to do the task.

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