TEAMWORK!

(omg this was way too hard)

If I could make the perfect team, I would not clone myself four times.

As a teammate I’m flawed:

• I have a strong personality and tend to think that my ideas are superior (“if your idea was better, I would admit it, but it’s not”)
• I don’t trust people enough. Which leads to
• I tend to micromanage (and I hate micromanaging, which makes me a crotchety emailer)

to list a few. But this isn’t about my personal failures as a teammate (at least directly), its about what makes a good team (which also makes it harder to write because I’m way better at talking about my opinions).

Lets start off with what makes a team a team. Fundamentally a team is a collaboration between people. If communication only flowed in one direction (ie. down a chain of command) it is not a team. What makes a team more special than, lets say an assembly line, is that a good team is better than the sum of its parts. Kinda like how a well written research paper probably isn’t “you write one part, I’ll write the other, and we’ll combine it on google docs.”

I asked HelpMe (an Olin mailing list) about what their best team experience was and why. Three things stood out from the responses. A good team:

1. Has a mutual shared interest (ideally it would be the project at hand, but it could also be something like an interest in keeping the team together, or chocolate).
2. Has diversity: in both opinions and skill sets.
3. Is baller at communication.

Communication of course is a huge umbrella term for a bunch of interactions but we’ll break it down into several key components:

1. Respect - Respect for things like my teammate’s time, making sure that I get to meetings on time, and that I respect things like deadlines for completing things that my teammates waiting on. But also just respect in the normal sense, don’t be a butt face.
2. Trust - At the same time, when the table’s turned and I’m asking my teammate for something (ie. designing the linkage system for a kinetic sculpture) I need to take a step back and let them do their thing. I’ve found that hounding people not only pisses me off but usually pisses off the person getting hounded.
3. Acknowledgement - Acknowledgement is key for trust to happen. It’s hard for me to trust people on faith alone. Especially when group work in K-12 usually just meant more work. Little things like getting an “Accepted” response after sending a meeting request, small updates in the hall like “I just pushed the code onto github” are important for me at least to keep peace of mind. At the same time I’m guilty of reading an email, understanding what needs to happen, failing to communicate that, possibly causing some anxiety to the sender.

People say that communication is a two way street, which is an okay analogy but I think it’s really more like a four way stop, when you and that other car get there at the same time. The other driver does that nod thing, you bring up your hand like “thanks.” Driving is one of the biggest displays of human cooperation. And I’m off topic.