Team Dynamics

An efficiently time-boxed project is great, but it's nothing without a well-functioning team.

"Team" can mean many different things. Susan Wheelan distinguishes (2010) work groups, which have been a part of human civilisation for centuries, from teams, which are more deliberate formations of people, who have developed shared goals and methods to accomplish those goals. Wheelan's IMGD models a group's journey towards establishing those goals and methods.

But humans have complex and varied personalities, which might make forming teams around shared goals difficult. Many frameworks for categorising personalities exist, from the widely-used MBTI (Myers & Briggs Foundation, 2019) to the SDI Triangle (Scudder, 2019). These provide a vocabulary to reason about oneself and the team, and they are very valuable for that. Unfortunately, people tend to turn their personality type into an absolute truth, and start building walls between the different personality camps. Personalities are fluid, hardly captured by strict definitions, and this practice harms collaboration in the long run.

Wheelan argues (2010) that team members don't need to have matching personalities, social time, or even like each other to form an effective team. Instead, teams should be formed based on technical skills and understanding of team dynamics.

As with project management, many frameworks exist to explain team dynamics. In the following I have summarised different theories into five best practices well-performing teams should adhere to.

Make everyone feel safe

Google found (2019) that psychological safety was by far the most important contributor to team effectiveness. Team members should feel able to safely take risks, admit mistakes, and ask questions.

Being able to share ideas leads to collective intelligence: the ideas of different minds merge into one collective. This only works if there's no seniority or superiority at play. Sawyer (2015) calls this the blending of egos.

Psychological safety can be improved by fostering a culture of inclusion and respect. People's individual differences should be embraced (Wheelan, 2010). Team members should work together to overcome differences, praise, and use feedback to help improve. In turn, leaders should make sure that feedback remains about the project, not the person.

Personal Experience Case Study: MVP'Z

Team MVP'Z was the epitome of psychological safety. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other through a team meal. Early on, regular reflections made me feel a lot better about my insecurities with the module's content.

As we were forced remote, we spent quite some time finding that safety online. Instead of being around each other all day, we switched to task-focused calls, and forgot our check-ins. It took us some time to become deliberate about social time again, and we could have experimented with that more.

Balance skill and challenge

In his seminal work, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines (1991) flow state as a positive state of complete absorption with the activity at hand. Flow state requires the task to be not so difficult to be frustrating, and not so easy to be boring. Similarly, groups experience group flow when their skillset matches their challenges (Sawyer, 2015).

This balance can be achieved by stimulating a drive for success in the face of potential failure. This success needs to be encouraged on both a company level (by placing importance on high-quality, timely work (Google, 2019)) and an inter-collegial level (by holding each other accountable (Wheelan, 2010)).

The risk of failure is part of what enables group flow – it heightens the stakes and thus the amount of energy everyone puts in. Every project can be seen as a rehearsal for the next one.

The problem is that most businesses are designed to minimise risk, and most of them punish failure.

As per the previous section, failure should not be punished, but rather encouraged as a necessary step towards success.

In the face of these difficult challenges, teams will need to develop interdependence to solve the problem together (Wheelan, 2010), which will increase team spirit.

Personal Experience Case Study: Piña Collabra

I felt very insecure about Business Transformation, thinking it was just corporate BS. At the start of the project, we discussed our biggest fears in a Stinky Fish session. I learned that most of my teammates felt the same way, which greatly reduced my anxiety. Going one step further we defined a personal commitment for ourself that held us accountable.

These were great tools that we could have used more throughout the project, as there were moments where we all felt the same frustration but didn't speak up.

Balance structure and autonomy

A good team knows what they're supposed to do, and has the autonomy to do that in their own way.

According to Wheelan (2010), the most important characteristic of a strong team is that members are clear about the teams' goals, and they agree with them & their relevance. These goals are concretised into daily life through roles and tasks, which groups should be able to set themselves to fit their team dynamic, and are upheld through discussion and planning.

Similar to the previous section, structure and autonomy should be in balance with each other. Some amount of goal setting is needed so that the team can tell if they're getting closer to a solution to the problem (Sawyer, 2015). Heuristics and best practices are good kickstarters of "just enough structure", and have helped companies make their high-level strategy adaptable for teams (Sull and Eisenhardt, 2012).

Over time, structure will lead to familiarity. Wheelan's IMGD (2010) is a testament to this familiarity. It describes four stages teams go through as they figure out shared goals and structure, and become more attuned to each other.

Groups can also become too familiar with each other over time, causing a drop in creative solutions. There's a balance to be struck between structure (which improves performance) and diversity (which improves creativity) (Sawyer, 2015).

Projects at Basecamp go through a process of "shaping" first: management selects ideas and sketches out the rough solution before handing it to a project team, which are then fully responsible for executing it (Singer, 2019).

Similarly, Spotify grants its various teams "aligned autonomy": they are free to define their own goals and methods, so long as they adhere to the overarching company goals (Kniberg, 2014).

Personal Experience Case Study: Team 💎

We had brainstormed ideas, picked our favourite one, and now it became time to concretise the idea by making a journey map. After two hours of trying to map the entire situation, we were stuck with a very complicated diagram and two "places" we could implement our idea in. We all felt tired, frustrated, and stuck with our idea. We had been stuck in the studio for days with the same structure to our creative process.

In an effort to shake things up, we decided to go for an inspiration walk around the city, to find the real problem through observation. Within minutes it opened our eyes and we connected dots we hadn't before. After that, we used six thinking hats (De Bono, 1985) to take on different roles and critique our idea. This method allowed us all to step out of our existing team dynamic and think about an idea from all directions. It was refreshing for both the idea and our team process!

Be Present and Dedicated

Groups who are in constant, spontaneous conversation with each other are more likely to build trust, familiarity, and even group flow (Sawyer, 2015). This constant communication requires everyone to be fully present and keep an open mind.

Innovation is blocked when one or more participants already has a preconceived idea of how to get to the goal.

Similarly, there can't be any overpowering voices or silent observers. All participants should be able to participate equally, and not be limited by corporate structure or (lack of) skills. Leaders can be a part of this, but only by participating the same way as everyone else – which is exactly how Wheelan (2010) describes the role of the leader in stage 4 of the IMGD.

Presence and dedication stem from sincere interest and motivation. Team members need to find a sense of purpose in participating, be that financial security, self expression, or something else. On a higher level, the team's goals need to be perceived (by the members) to be important and make a difference (Google, 2019).

Personal Experience Case Study: Unstable Connections

Remote work felt way more exhausting than in-person collaboration. In an effort to keep us all engaged, we religiously employed Pomodoro sessions to split up our day into chunks of 25 minutes of hard, concentrated work, followed by five-minute breaks. This kept us present and our conversations light.

Five minutes is not a lot of time, however, and it didn't replenish all the energy needed. We could have combined this with method with more regular energisers and fun sessions in between the serious brainstorming. Time boxing isn't everything, "content boxing" matters too.

Lead the Way in Many Ways

In a culture of autonomous teams, what's the role of a leader? Well, that differs.

According to Wheelan (2010), leadership should be adaptive: a leader's approach should change when necessary to meet the team's needs. Indeed, Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee define (2013) six distinct emotional intelligence leadership styles, which exemplary leaders switch between on the fly.

Notably, leaders do not need to be special people with tremendous amounts of skill; instead, the average person of good will, who is flexible and willing to learn some basic skills, can be an effective leader (Wheelan, 2010).