What are other qualities of good teams?

Good teams are smarter. Good teams, teams that are gelled, are collectively more intelligent. Research shows that good teams accomplish tasks better than a collection of smart individuals, because there’s less posturing. Not to mention, it takes a ton of bad ideas before you get to a single good idea, and a good team allows you to quickly sort through ideas, good or bad because you’re not worried about managing perception.

Good teams share control. They demonstrate they actually are listening, care when someone is flustered or upset, defer to the judgements of the people on the team, and treat the concerns of others as our own. Good teams demonstrate empathy.

Satisfaction is satisfaction. What satisfies a team satisfies an individual:

believe that your work is important

personally meaningful

clear and defined roles

psychologically safety

Interestingly enough, as Cate Huston notes, that it’s not solely overwork that leads to burn out, but the absence of control, insufficient reward, lack of community, absence of fairness, conflict in values then overwork.

Shadow sides

Firstly: psychological safety may not be available to each person on your team. Under-indexed groups like people of color, women of all stripes, queer, or trans folks may not actually be able to bring their whole selves to work because of some very real safety concerns. That’s a real shame. We need to do better.

Secondly, there is a difference between being professional-yet-vulnerable, and bringing baggage to work. Be your best professional self.

Now that we are familiar with the quality of a good team, let’s talk about the small practicalities that set the stage for good team genesis.

Practical magic

Hey! Listen!

Do you practice active listening? When someone tells you something do you give them eye contact and acknowledge that you understood them? Do you repeat it back? Listening is the baseline of trust, and the beginning of a great working team.

Play a game

Jane McGonigal is a neurologist and game designer. In her book Superbetter, she lays out lots of ways that games are surprisingly amazing for fostering human connection. Lots of things happen when people play games together:

you become more in sync

you mirror each other — in breath, and even in your neurons.

Playing a game with someone increases your empathy for that person, the group they belong to, and bumps up your capability for compassion in general.

McGonigal focuses on video games, but these good effects can be felt while playing a game of catch, going for a walk, or moving a heavy object — anything that requires hand-eye coordination.

Pair program

Pair programming is awesome. It’s so rare that we actually talk about code in concretely as opposed to abstractly. If you spend time developing, I encourage you to do more of it. If you manage people, encourage your staff to pair program. It’s a great way to learn how to approach problem solving with code differently! (I’m also a set-up nerd, so I love seeing how others work, what plugins they use, etc.)

Better meetings

The best meeting is the one you don’t have, but, if you’re gonna have a meeting — practice good meeting hygiene. Ken Norton has written and spoken extensively about this, so if you’re interested in revamping your meeting culture, you should check his work out. I’ll sum up what I find best about better meetings:

Provide an agenda. This allows people to have a chance to think about what they’re gonna say — this is especially helpful for women, remote folks, and introverts.

This allows people to have a chance to think about what they’re gonna say — this is especially helpful for women, remote folks, and introverts. Consider interruption-free meetings. Women often get interrupted while speaking. Instituting a culture of interruption free meetings can help address this.

Women often get interrupted while speaking. Instituting a culture of interruption free meetings can help address this. Make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak up. Good teams have an equality in turn-taking while speaking, and they make sure everyone gets a chance to speak.

Chit Chat

Those first five minutes of a meeting? Where there’s loads of cross-talk? That’s actually the most important part of a meeting. It’s a time for you to bond with your workmates, and find out what’s going on in their lives outside of work. Do you know if they have pets or maybe have a vacation planned? Do they have kids? Is there a hobby they’re particular passionate about? What this comes down to is this: Are you genuinely interested in them as humans? Interest is the basis of human bonds. Stronger human bonds are ultimately what help us create this ideal working environment.

Effective feedback

Completing cycles of feedback are important so you grow and learn as a team, and avoid falling into stasis. Furthermore, it’s an essential mechanism by which to calibrate your team. Gelled teams exhibit care for one another, which is the breeding ground for good feedback. Giving timely feedback isn’t harmful, it’s helpful. If I have food in my teeth, I’d want you to tell me — this is the self-same principle of effective feedback.

Shadow sides

Firstly: you can’t make people do what they don’t wanna do! There is research that shows that humans, even when the choice means nothing, would still prefer to make a choice. We all crave autonomy.

Secondly: Giving feedback can be really hard, and it takes effort and practice to do well.

Thirdly: Chit-chatting can be hard for remote teams! Remember to keep them in mind, and include them, too.

tl;dr

Productivity is a measure of comfort Good teams are a secret weapon Don’t suppress your humanity

Vulnerability, solidarity, mutual support — it’s our superpower! Let’s use it.

Many thanks to the many people who listened to this talk and gave me feedback, and the Slack engineering team, who are every bit as aces as they seem.

Referenced Works

¹ Schwartz, Tony. “The Secret to Sustaining High Job Performance.” New York Times. 13 November 2015. Web.

² Duhigg, Charles. “What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” New York Times Magazine. 25 February 2016. Web.

³ Cross, Rob, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant. “Collaborative Overload.” Harvard Business Review. January-February 2016 issue. Web.

⁴ Requiem for the American Dream. Dir. Kelly Nyks, Peter D. Hutchinson, Jared P. Scott. Perf. Noam Chomsky. Naked City Films, PF Pictures, Gravitas Ventures. 18 April 2015. Documentary film.

⁵ Barba, Lorena. “Beyond Learning to Program: Education, Open Source Culture, and Structured Collaboration in Language.” Pycon 2016, Portland Oregon, May 28th 2016 —June 5th 2016 . Keynote. Video.

⁶ Alspaw, John. “Blameless Postmortems and Just Culture.” Code as Craft. 22 May 2012. Web.

⁷ Duhigg, Charles. Smarter, Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2016. Print.

⁸ Stone, Douglas, and Sheila Heen. Thanks for the Feedback: the Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Print.

⁹ Kegan, Robert, and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Matthew L. Miller, Andy Fleming, Deborah Helsing. An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016. Print.

¹⁰ McGonigal, Jane. SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. Print.