Practical recommendations for team work
Overview
Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 20 minQuestions
What are practical tips for doing team work?
What soft skills are valuable when working in teams?
How can I apply what I learned in my daily work?
Objectives
List a few practical recommendations for doing teamwork
Know which soft skills make great teams
Practical recommendations
Discussion: Your practical tips.
Based on your own experience, what would be your top-3 practical tips that you would like to give someone that is new to working in a team? This can be based on experience with formal teams, in pairs, or any other form of collaborative work.
Our tips:
- Any mutation to the team makes a new team. Whenever a team member leaves or is added to the team, you should treat this as the start of a new team. The ways of working before can be maintained for a start but be prepared for large changes in the team dynamic, which will also influence which ways of working make up for the optimal team process.
- Teams need a coach. Self-organization of teams doesn’t happen automatically. It can be very beneficial to have someone in or close to the team that can coach the team in the right direction.
- Enjoy. Value joy in team meetings and interactions. Working together in an enthusiastic group of people makes all the rest simple.
- Invest in soft skills. Certain soft skills are vital for teamwork, see below.
Soft skills
Teams stand or fall with good soft skills of team members.
Discussion: Soft skills.
Which soft skills do you think are important to have when doing teamwork. For example, think about applying the agile frameworks that we learned about, what soft skills are important?
These are some important soft skills needed in teams:
Giving good feedback
Learning from each other is one of the benefits of team work. For this, giving good feedback is vital.
How to give good feedback?
- Make it specific
- Give feedback from your perspective. Feedback is always subjective.
- Don’t wait too long with giving feedback.
- Stay positive. A good rule is to always start with something positive.
- Prepare your comments.
How to receive feedback?
- Don’t feel attacked. The person giving you feedback is trying to help you.
- Ask for clarification if the feedback is not specific enough.
If you want to learn more about giving feedback in a way that is pleasant for others, we recommend that you take a course dedicated to this topic with your whole team. For a first impression, here is a short guide about giving constructive feedback.
Build trust
Trust between team members is important for:
- Trusting each other to successfully finish tasks.
- Giving good feedback to each other.
- Knowing that feedback will be given to you in case you can improve on something.
How to build trust in a team?
- Create a safe environment for failures. Don’t blame people personally.
- Admit when you don’t know something.
- Give praise. The importance of positive feedback is often forgotten.
- Also talk regularly with your team members about non-work related stuff.
Be inclusive
Inclusivity is when individuals with different identities, backgrounds or other characteristics making them vulnerable for exclusion, are welcomed in a group setting. It is good to be aware of this in a team.
Tips for being inclusive
- Dare to speak up if you feel someone is left out. If done constructively, this is usually appreciated by everyone.
- Acknowledge that you have an unconscious bias.
- Try to imagine yourself being in the place of your team members.
- Having trust in the team helps (see above).
- Set up policies or explicit common practices for the whole team if unconscious exclusion persists. E.g. put up a reminder that the whole team should speak in English when you are in the vicinity of people that do not speak your first language.
Team bonding
This may sound trivial, but don’t underestimate the importance of team bonding. It really helps to step out of the formal office setting, and improve the relationships in the team over a drink, doing a sports activity, or solving an escape room together. Engaging in social activities is also one of the best ways to build trust between members.
Wrapping up
Exercise: Wrapping up.
Take a few minutes to write down your thoughts on what you learned about teamwork in this course:
- What questions do you still have?
- Whether there are any incremental improvements that can benefit your projects?
- What’s nice that we learnt but is overkill for your current work?
Key Points
Learn from other people’s experiences working in teams.
Certain soft skills are vital for teamwork.