Teamwork

Teamwork skills are important in engineering, business and life.

On your projects, teamwork is important in the allocation and coordination of tasks. Your team will also need to make decisions that, sooner or later, will require you to figure out how to resolve differences of opinion.

In this class we use CATME as a tool to organize teams and to help you learn about teamwork.

CATME

The CATME web site has tools for team meetings including

Team-member preparation worksheet (MS Word Document)
Team Charter template (MS Word document)

Team Contract

Your team should understand and discuss these values.

Ethics: how you make choices when no one is watching
Respect: treating others with dignity regardless of gender, ethnic background, technical ability, physical appearance, etc.
Professionalism: adhering to, upholding, and advancing behaviors that support your professional community, and produce good outcomes in the practice of your discipline.
Honesty: telling the truth, even when it is not easy to do so.
Compassion: having a helpful and non-judgemental attitude toward others
Performance and competitiveness: focus on achieving results and being better than others.

Are those values important? Are they shared? What happens when shared values are not followed by group members? What happens when values that are important to you are in conflict? These questions are important explore with your teammates in order to avoid the problems arising from the Five Dysfunctions of a Team discussed below.

Advice On Team Contracts

Establish a regular meeting time.
Develop a template for meeting agendas
Make meeting agendas available before meetings
Record attendance at meetings
Make sure someone records meeting notes and publishes those notes soon after the meeting

Writing agendas, taking notes and publishing notes requires effort. Some teams conclude, incorrectly, that the effort of organizing and documenting meetings detracts from other design tasks. While the effort is real and should be invested efficiently, teams that do not organize and document meetings end up wasting more time during their meeting than would be spent by one or two individuals who organize and document the meeting.

To improve efficiency and effective planning and documentation, use templates for agendas and meeting minutes. Keep the minutes concise and focus on making and recording those decisions. Keeping attendance is also helpful at documenting patterns of any members who shirk their responsibilities.

Decision-making

Your team will need to decide how it decides. See Section 3.8 in the textbook by Mattson and Sorenson

Given a choice of two options, when consensus cannot be reached, how will the group decide? Majority vote? Abstention?
Given a choice of more than two options, how will the group decide? ranked voting? range voting? instant-runoff voting?
Under what circumstances are members of the team qualified to vote? Does everyone vote all the time? Are there situations where the group defers to the opinion of a member with specialized expertise? Or does that member just offer information with no opinion?
What is the role of the "expert" or "creator" of an engineering sub-system? For example, does the team member who designed the control system have more influence on whether to add features to, or even abandon the control system? Do they have more say, or equal say? Both options can cause problems.
Understanding that decision is a moving forward means that you have to accept the decision of the group?

It is a good idea to develop a team charter at the start of working together. Hashing out agreements on how to decide is best done before difficult decisions need to be made.

Behaviors of successful teams

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Patrick Lencioni wrote a popular book called, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, (Amazon link to the book and Amazon link to short summary). The dysfunctions are

Lack of trust
Fear of conflict
Lack of commitment
Avoidance of accountability
Inattention to results

Put more positively, cohesive and effective teams

Trust one another
Engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas
Commit to decisions and plans of action
Hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans
Focus on achieving collective results

Of course, having a list like this does not guarantee success. The key is to find way to put these ideas in continuous practice.

1. Trust

When members of a team lack trust, they will be hesitant to express their true opinions, and they will not be comfortable sharing information about their mistakes. A lack of trust leads to an unwillingness to be vulnerable and honest. A lack of trust causes team members to hide problems and to put a positive spin on information. Thus, a lack of trust lowers the quality of information the team uses to make decisions.

Cultivating trust builds team cohesiveness and makes it safe for team members to be open and honest. That in turn leads to better results because each member of the team is willing to participate fully, and team members are more open and accurate about problems they are trying to resolve. Honesty and transparency enabled by trust gives the team more accurate information for its decisions.

2. Allowing and managing conflict

A lack of trust leads to an avoidance of conflict because engaging in discussions with conflicting viewpoints is not safe. A diverse team will have different opinions on the work that needs to be done and the standards of acceptable performance. It is crucial to team cohesiveness and success that these different opinions are aired and discussed.

Even if the team cannot develop a perfect consensus (which is rare), it is important to have every member's input. It is important that everyone shares ideas freely, even if the team makes a decision contrary to those ideas. Managing conflict requires tolerance of differing viewpoints, talking about ideas without making the arguments personal, a willingness to be persuaded, and an acceptance of the group's decision in the event you are not persuaded.

Note: Fear of conflict should not be managed by encouraging conflict. Furthermore, beneficial conflict occurs in the realm of ideas, and does not involve personal attacks.

3. Engaging team members commitment

Once a decision is made, it is important for all members to commit to the plan and the outcome. That can be difficult, especially when the decision-making process has involved intense conflict. A team with trust that manages conflict well is more likely to make clear decisions (even if they are wrong!) and act on those decisions with commitment. On the other hand, a team will falter when there is a lack of commitment from team members, or when disgruntled team members act to undermine the work required by the team's decisions.

4. Holding each other accountable

Accountability is "willingness of team members to call their peers on performance behaviors that might hurt the team". If teams lack trust, or if the team cannot manage conflict, the team may get into a pattern of tolerating inequitable levels of effort or quality of work. Most people can sense when there is uneven work load and work quality. When team members do not feel comfortable discussing inequity, trust is eroded further and team cohesion suffers. The solution is to have open discussions about work load and work quality when the load and/or quality are not roughly comparable for all team members.

Holding each other accountable is difficult even if there is trust and the team effectively manages conflict. Lencioni says that effective teams that hold each other accountable demonstrate "that they respect each other and have high expectations for one another's performance … there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected teammates to motivate people to improve their performance"

So, how can you hold each other, and yourself, accountable? Lencioni suggests

Publication of goals and standards: make objectives clear, concrete and attainable so that failure to reach objectives is obvious.
Simple and regular progress reviews: In meetings, report on results, not on activity. In other words, report on what you have finished and what you have learned about what you need to do next. Obviously effort matters, but activity is not the same as productivity. Keeping busy is not enough, especially when the work that keeps you busy does not contribute to team goals.
Team rewards: Change the focus from individual performance to team performance. If the team is not reaching it's goal because of an individual, the problem is owned by the whole team.

5. Paying attention to results

To achieve its goals, the team needs to have clear and attainable goals (see item 4, above) and focus actions on achieving those goals. To repeat,

Have specific and attainable objectives.
Understand what "done" means for each of those objectives.
Maintain focus on completing the objectives, not on keeping busy.

While it is important to be cordial and encouraging to teammates, good teams hold each other accountable to do work that contributes to results. For example, if the design can be advanced without a complex and beautifully rendered solid model, then spending time on making such a model does not contribute to the team goals and should not be encouraged or tolerated. Working on unproductive pet projects is especially counterproductive when other critical tasks are left undone.

One way to focus on results is to make public declarations of the team goals. When an ambitious goal is visible to many people, team members are likely (though not guaranteed) to be more engaged in attaining the publicly stated goal.

Benefits of Civility

Christine Porath studies the benefits of civility in the work place. Her research shows that incivility hurts productivity, reduces creativity, and causes teammates to be disengaged.

Porath and Pearson (2009, The Cost of Bad Behavior, Organizational Dynamics, Vol 39, no. 1, pp. 64–71) define incivility as

the exchange of seemingly inconsequential inconsiderate words and deeds that violate conventional norms of workplace conduct.

…

Common examples of incivility include:

*􏰀 taking credit for other’s efforts

*􏰀 passing blame for our own mistakes

*􏰀 checking e-mail or texting during meetings

*􏰀 talking down to others

*􏰀 not listening

*􏰀 belittling others

*􏰀 withholding information

*􏰀 paying little attention or showing little interest in others’ opinions

*􏰀 making demeaning or derogatory remarks to someone

*􏰀 avoiding someone

Dealing with incivility is not easy. Refer to Porath's web site for ideas. But let's start with the first step: working to become more civil in our interactions. Have a look at the preceding list of examples and try to develop an awareness of your use of these behaviors.

Are you a source of energy?

Read this short blog post by Seth Godin on the 'First Law of Organizational Thermodynamics'

Be Constructive, not Just Critical

This lifehacker post has good advice on how to give effective criticism. First, get clear on your goals and act consistently with those goals:

Remember, the point of your criticism is to help someone improve, or to correct a problem that impacts them, you, and likely others. You're not venting, you're not working out your stress, and you're not boosting your own ego – if you are, stop now and reevaluate whether you actually have legitimate criticism to give, or you just need to talk to someone. If you genuinely want to help someone, or see behavior that needs to be corrected, make sure your feedback carries that message.

Read the entire post.

Examples of Less-than-helpful behaviors to avoid

Justifying

Seth Godin's post on Justification:

Of course your behavior is justifiable.

That's not the question.

The question is, "is it helping?"

It's easy to justify our mood or our actions based on how we've been treated by the outside world. Justification isn't the goal, though. It's effectiveness that matters.

We get to pick how we act, and it seems as though choosing what works, choosing what makes us happy, choosing what makes the world the place we want to make it - these choices are more useful than any justification we can dream up.

Godin's advice is related to the holding-each-other-accountable and focus-on-the-objectives advice by Lencioni.

Don't be an asshole

Excuse the crude language. This advice is derived from the book by Robert Sutton. I'm using the word "asshole" to refer to the behavior that Sutton warns us against, and to use his term for that behavior.

Robert Sutton, a Professor of Management Science at Stanford University, wrote a popular book on management called, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. In it, Sutton argues that bullying behavior does not usually increase productivity and even in those rare cases where it does, life is too short to tolerate it. A short version of these ideas are in an article in the McKinsey Quarterly of May 2007.

Sutton's advice is related to the advice of Lencioni about trust, tolerance-of-conflict, and holding-each-other-accountable. It goes further than Lencioni to show that toxic behaviors can undermine otherwise positive institutional goals.

The key idea for Capstone teams is know that bullying is not a good tactic to get your teammates to perform better. Bullying is wrong, period. As a so-called management strategy, bullying might appear to work when it causes a teammate to comply. However, the lasting impact of bullying is negative.

Yes, it's important to hold each other, and yourself accountable for work-related responsibilities and commitments. Yes, ignoring a problem allows it to continue. Yes, teams would work better if everyone met their commitments and performed to high standards. However, being a jerk, a bully or an asshole is not a productive way to deal with those issues.

Dealing with Difficult Teammates

Suppose that one (or more) members of the team are not doing acceptable work. Your team is stressed because deadlines are approaching, or have passed, and the quality of work is not allowing the team to meet its goals. Someone has let you down. Perhaps that person has repeatedly let you down.

Being a bully won't really help. A more productive, humane, and effective approach involves three activities.

Obtain an accurate description of the problem.
Come up with a plan to get the work done.
Agree on specific outcomes for acceptable future work.

In general, the goal is to focus on the outcome – lack of participation in group work, individual work that wasn't done on time, or done at all, or done poorly – and not on the person. Obviously, the problem would not exist if the unproductive team member had simply done the work. However, rather than trying to change the person (a futile exercise), work toward increasing the odds of good future outcomes.

The first step is obtaining clarity on the problem that caused friction in the team. What work wasn't done? How is the quality of work causing problems? As tempting as it is to be punitive, try to be objective and let go of the (natural) desire to blame and seek justice. It would probably be good for you to have someone to talk to that can listen to your complaints and frustrations. Ask a friend or life partner to listen. Avoid attacking your underperforming teammate as a way to vent your frustration. That is hard!

Back to your team: having a mutual agreement on the problem will be more beneficial to the team's progress than any personal satisfaction you might get from retribution. (Also consider the karma that will come back to you when you have a turn making a mistake or letting the team down.) The goal of this first step is simply to make the unacceptable behavior clear so that any repetition can be called out fairly and soon. It is a good idea to explain how the poor performance has a negative impact on the whole team. (Refer to a preceding section for Lencioni's advice on paying attention to results.)

Once the past problem has been described, come up with a plan to either get the work done correctly, or adjust the future plans to accomodate the poorly done work. In the case of accommodation, it simply may be better for the team to accept the consequences of the poor quality work and to move on to other tasks. Or not. If the work is crucial, the group will have to devise a plan to complete it at a sufficient level of quality.

Finally, use the problem description obtained in the first step to describe the consequences that will occur if the new work fails to meet standards of timeliness, quality or other requirements. The goal is to not to set traps or prepare another round of blame. The goal is to use the clearly defined consequences to reduce the possibility that future work will have the same, undesirable outcome.

Dealing with teammates who let you down is not easy. There are no methods to guarantee a positive outcome. However, there are behaviors that almost certainly reduce the odds of future success, and one of those is being a bully to your teammates.