It has taken me a while to write this both because it is not a simple topic and because my personal life took me away from my blog goals.
After deciding from my 2022 skills evaluation that I wanted my teamwork skills to be a focus this year, I was left with a problem. How does one deliberately focus on improving their teamwork? “Jacob, that’s easy, just do … (insert specific action here)” let me explain why I don’t think it is as easy as it sounds.
My analogy is that a basketball player would improve by doing any one of 100s of different drills, but any good coach would choose specific drills tailored to the player. As far as teamwork goes, I’m a new college player who realizes he needs to up his game in order to stay relevant. I don’t want to just improve generally; I want to get better at winning games.
The first problem with deliberately improving teamwork ability is it is very ill defined. All of the skill categories I use in my evaluation are a host of sub skills. However, I think teamwork is one of the more haphazard. It is a patchwork of leadership, followership, group psychology, social skills, common courtesy, delegation, and others. Being a good team member can mean a lot of things in a lot of different contexts. Mountains of advice, books, and courses exist that look at teams from a variety of angles. The only thing narrowing my search is that I’m excluding skills that mostly fit in my other skill categories: communication, documentation, and time management.
Every problem presents an opportunity. One opportunity in having a broad subject matter is identifying the underappreciated aspects of teamwork and working on those. I believe that finding and leveraging some hidden gems will help me even more than treading on well-worn paths. More thoughts on this down below.
The second problem with deliberately improving teamwork is what I will call the “warm fuzzy” problem. Much of the material I’ve come across in my life on teamwork and leadership is heavy on the cheer leading and light on the practical advice. “You can do it!” and “It will be awesome.” are great messages but they can’t be the only ones.
However, it isn’t only the messaging. I need to take personal responsibility and not just point the finger at the way books are written. The way I often consume improvement material is to breeze through it. Good books, filled with good stories, that give me good feelings are easy to read. I usually read them fast, and then it goes in one ear and out the other. I could give a long list of favorite improvement books. I could give a shorter list of concrete changes I made because of them.
How I’m trying to solve these problems
I already alluded to solving the problem that teamwork is ill defined. My goal is to start with the aspects of teamwork that are overlooked. The first aspect that comes to mind is followership. I know of many books and articles that talk about leadership, far fewer that talk about how to be led.
The majority of people are somewhere in the middle of their organization. According to the org chart, they are both leaders and followers. At my current company, the roles are very project based. On one project I may be the technical lead with three engineers contributing. On another project I am an individual contributor and am reporting progress to the very same engineers I was managing earlier in the day. It is easy to see how effective following could be a big improvement for me and make my teams more effective.
Solving the problem of only getting “warm fuzzies” has two parts: 1) choosing nutritional advice and 2) digesting it slowly enough to get the nutrients.
Luckily, I know an excellent book that covers both leadership and followership. It is Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet. Out of all the self-improvement and leadership books I have read it is my favorite. My first deliberate improvement project will be to sit down for a reread, while having a notebook handy to make sure I capture the relevant changes I need to make. I will follow up with another blog post of what I learn and change.
First steps
It took me 5 months to write this post and I don’t want my action plan to only be “read a book and come back later”. That sounds a lot like improvement by government committee. There are some things I know I could work on right away that would make a big difference.
As an engineer, I often see the world through the lens of things to improve. I focus on what can get better so much that I miss the things that are already good. I notice these things that are good, but I rarely verbalize them. My wonderful wife has helped point out this habit in me time and time again. When I don’t express my positive thoughts, I give the wrong impression that I am dissatisfied overall. I can easily talk about the positive attributes of an idea or a design when I remember to.
The teamwork change I want to make right away is for every meeting I have (in person and virtual), I will start the top of my notes by writing, “Look for the positive rather than fixate on the negative.” This physical and mental reminder should help shift my communications and feedback on people and projects. I want this to be a cascade habit that helps me give more compliments, find the bright side more often, and lift the people around me. After all, I think that being an effective team member goes hand in glove with being a good person to be around.