If you have to tell people what to do, you didn’t teach them to think for themselves.
If you know one of your team members has something to say but they don’t say it, it’s because you didn’t create an environment where they feel safe.
If your new hire doesn’t lead an important part of a project within the first week, you did them a disservice.
If the team learns the same thing three times, you should have stepped in two times ago.
If you don’t demand that your team uses their discretion, they won’t.
If the project’s definition of success doesn’t correlate with business success, you should have asked for a better definition of success before the project started.
If someone on your team tells you you’re full of sh*t, thank them for their truthfulness.
If your team asks for permission, change how you lead them.
If you can’t imagine that one of your new hires will be able to do your job in five years, you hired the wrong people.
If your team doesn’t disagree with you, it’s because you haven’t led from your authentic self.
If your team doesn’t believe in themselves, neither do you.
If your team disobeys your direct order, thank them for disobeying and apologize for giving them an order.
If you ask a new hire to lead an important part of a project and you don’t meet with them daily to help them, you did them a disservice.
If one of your team members moves to another team and their new leader calls them “unmanageable”, congratulations.
If your team knows what you’ll say before they ask you, you’ve led them from your authentic self.
If you haven’t chastised your team members for their lack of disagreement with you, you should.
If you don’t tell people they did a good job, they won’t.
Image credits: Pixabay
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Teams are how work gets done most of the time. In a knowledge work economy, up to 85% of an average employee’s time is spent in collaboration with other people—on one team or on multiple teams. And that makes effective collaboration and good teamwork a top tier skill. Whether you’re currently a leader or looking to become a leader, focusing on developing your teamwork skills—and the level of teamwork on your team—is one of the highest returns on effort you can experience.
In this article, we’ll outline three keys to good teamwork and offer a few practical ways to improve on each one.
1. Clarity
The first key to good teamwork is clarity. Teammates need a clear set of tasks and objectives, and also to be clear on the tasks others are focused on. They need to be able to depend on the team to deliver on commitments and be clear about how their deliverables fit into the larger whole. In addition, teams need clarity on each others knowledge, skills, abilities, strengths and weaknesses. They need to know who the subject matter expert is for any given task and who is still developing that skill in order to properly assign tasks…and to ask the right person for help from time to time.
There are a number of ways to establish clarity when beginning a project, but teams also need to be deliberate about maintaining clarity as the project rolls out and the fog of work sets in. One effective way to do that is through a “huddle”—a regular, and fast paced meeting where teammates gather and report on what they’ve completed, where their focus is now, and where they might need help. Overtime, this routine will help everyone know what’s happening, but also who is excelling at what tasks and how they can help each other.
2. Empathy
The second key to good teamwork is empathy. If clarity is about understanding the tasks, empathy is about understanding the people on the team. Teammates need to know about each other’s different work preferences, personalities, and routines. Without empathy, we tend to assume our teammates will think and act like us—and when they don’t it can create conflict and confusion. And the more diverse a team, the more important empathy becomes on the team.
There are a variety of ways to build empathy but one of the most effective is through crafting and revising a team charter—or ways of working, group norms, rules of the road, and a host of other names. The idea behind a team charter is to facilitate a conversation about all the taken-for-granted assumptions about collaboration the team may have—like proper email response time, reasons to call meetings, ways to make decisions, etc. As they discuss, the team arrives at a set of norms they can agree to and then they abide by those norms for a few months before revisiting and revising based on what was learned. Empathy isn’t created by having the document, but rather in the process of having all those discussions.
3. Safety
The third key to good teamwork is safety—as in psychological safety. The level of mutual trust and respect felt on a team has a massive effect on the team’s ability to perform. If teammates feel safe to speak up, share ideas, or admit failures than the quality of their conversations and collaboration improves dramatically. Without psychological safety teams struggle to achieve a growth mindset and to learn and grow—and that puts a ceiling on the performance they’ll experience.
One fast way to start building psychological safety on a team is to signal vulnerability by asking for feedback. This is especially effective for leaders who can send individual emails out to each teammate asking just two simple questions:
What’s something I do well I should do more of?
What’s something you wish I would stop doing?
Because every teammate will have different answers, leaders will need to synthesize all the answers before they can apply anything learned. But the very action of asking for such honest feedback will signal to the team that their leader wants transparency. Over time that transparency will grow the feeling of psychological safety—especially once the team sees their feedback being applied.
And once psychological safety on the team grows, it will be easier to grow empathy as well. And when safety and empathy are high, teammates give more honest status updates in their huddles and clarity grows as well. As all three of these keys to good teamwork grow, the team’s performance will grow, because the team will become a place where everyone feels like they can do their best work ever.
Image credit: Pexels
Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on April 3, 2023.
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In 2011 a Ron Howard comedy was released starring Kevin James, Vince Vaughn, Winona Ryder, Channing Tatum, Jennifer Connelly, and Queen Latifah. The film was called ‘The Dilemma’ and it was a very funny buddy comedy focused on commitment and marital infidelity. But today, we’re focused on one of the subplots that makes ‘The Dilemma’ a movie that every electric car designer should watch. The subplot highlighted a solution to the silent problem with electric vehicles and one of the barriers to widespread adoption.
Vince Vaughn and Kevin James’ characters are best friends and partners in a small auto design firm. The two have recently been given an opportunity to pitch an eco-friendly car to Dodge. One of the main features of this car is that it looks like a muscle car and it sounds like a muscle car, but it’s actually an electric car. Here is a video clip in German that I found on YouTube that shows their sound triumph:
Besides being like large golf carts, electric cars are also INCREDIBLY dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists at low speeds because they’re nearly silent. In addition to being dangerous, electric cars also sound boring.
Electric cars are so dangerous because of their silence, some governments are mandating that they make sounds at least while backing up – you know, those annoying beeping sounds.
Even the cool 1,500 horsepower equivalent electric Ford Mustang Cobra pictured above sounds really boring when it shoots off the line in its promo video going down the drag strip.
Designers, why can’t you implement more interesting, more exhilarating sounds like those in the video before we’re all forced to buy electric vehicles?
They could easily be designed to fade away as the vehicle reaches speeds of around 30 miles per hour and wind and road noise starts to become sufficient to give pedestrians and cyclists a fighting change.
What say you?
Image credit: Slashgear.com
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Every so often something comes along that is super funny, super cute, and super functional, all at the same time.
Check out the video below and then we’ll dive in to the innovation potential of The Rocketeer Pack by ZuGoPet.
I’m sorry, but I laugh every time I see this video, but at the same time I recognize that their solution is actually quite logical and practical.
I also have to laugh at the sizing guide, which suggests that you measure your dog in the “begging” position.
For an extra bonus the harness for the car can also be used as a front pack, meaning you can now take little ChiChi out for a ride on your motorcycle when he gets tired of riding in the car.
My early reactions? A Great idea with okay execution. I think they may be able to improve the design to make it easier to use, and as a result increase adoption but then I’ve never actually used one so I’m just judging by the video.
I do have to say that the video did highlight that seatbelts for people are badly in need of a re-design. I have a design for a built-in four point seatbelt that automobile manufacturers or insurance companies are welcome to talk to me about if they’re interested in increasing passenger safety and decreasing injury claims.
So, what do you think? Innovation or not?
Image credit: zugopet.com
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I love anything that is fun and investigates human psychology, especially crowd psychology, and the investigation of how you can use fun to potentially influence human behavior for social good (i.e. the piano stairs example I’ve shared before).
Nobody likes to wait at pedestrian crossings. Traffic lights can be dangerous for impatient pedestrians trying to save a few seconds to cross the street (and willing to risk their lives in the process).
The folks at Smart created The Dancing Traffic Light, an experiential marketing concept providing a fun and safe way to keep people from venturing too early into the street. They started by placing a dance room on a square in Lisbon, Portugal and invited random pedestrians to go into the box and dance. Their movements were then displayed on a few traffic lights in real time. This resulted in 81% more people stopping and waiting at those red lights.
It’s a genius marketing gimmick because it reinforces the brand value of fun by making people dance in a box that looks, imagine that, a bit like a smart car.
The question brought up by this example of a marketing campaign that claims that fun can be used to achieve social good, is that it claims a benefit, that without an extended test could be attributed to novelty…
Does the benefit hold up over time?
Or does it stop being fun and impactful after people have seen it once or twice or the live video component goes away and it becomes a recording? Do people then start jaywalking again at the normal rate?
What do you think?
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For an extra bonus the harness for the car can also be used as a front pack, meaning you can now take little ChiChi out for a ride on your motorcycle when he gets tired of riding in the car.
I love anything that is fun and investigates human psychology, especially crowd psychology, and the investigation of how you can use fun to potentially influence human behavior for social good (i.e. the piano stairs example I’ve shared before).