Teamwork
January 26, 2020 — April 28, 2024
Applied team coordination methods. Collective Workplace lifehacks. Two-pizza rules, diversity for efficiency or innovation. Methods of communication, the human dimension of project management for social brains who do not know it.
I would like more quantified and peer-reviewed content here, but I will take what I can get.
1 Institutions around teams
2 Keep the work parallel, the groups small, and the resources local.
When presented with a set of problems which grow superlinearly intractable as \(N\) increases, our best bet is to keep \(N\) small. If the organization’s intent is to increase value delivery by hiring more people, work efforts must be as independent as possible. …
Google’s Guide to Running the Perfect Meeting.
mhoye writes on software companies and the lessons their particular structures offer. Found via him, Dorian Taylor’s Agile as Trauma:
The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. The document is an expression of trauma, and its intellectual descendants continue to carry this baggage. While the Agile era has brought about remarkable advancements in project management techniques and development tools, it remains a tactical, technical, and ultimately reactionary movement. As long as Agile remains in this position it will be liable to backfire, vulnerable to the very depredations of bad management it had initially evolved to counter.
There is a neat bibliography of project management in there too.
3 Interpersonal dimension
Denise Yu, Habits of high-functioning teams:
Generous communication between peers means that at all times, we assume that anyone asking a question:
- Has done the basic research, e.g. they’ve googled the thing already
- Is asking a human, because they’ve been unable to find their answer in any written-down place. Because that written-down place is difficult to find, or it doesn’t exist yet.
In other words: assume your peer is a competent, intelligent, reasonable person who is asking a question because they’re lacking context, that they’ve already attempted to procure on their own.
There is some famous Google research on psychological safety in teams (not peer-reviewed, mind).
Google:
Of the five key dynamics of effective teams that the researchers identified, psychological safety was by far the most important. The Google researchers found that individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.
Atlassian’s State of Teams Report 2021.
4 Scenius
A term of art to describe Evolving weird effective communities.
5 Team flow
Pels, Kleinert, and Mennigen (2018):
Studies show that the experience of individual flow is not restricted to solitary behavior and that it can also occur in social situations (for an overview, see [12, 13]). Social situations range from situations in which persons attend to individual tasks with others merely being present (e.g., co-participants who also accomplish an individual task) to situations with highly interdependent tasks wherein others form an integral part of task accomplishment (e.g., cooperation in a group; [14]). In terms of individual tasks with others being present, a study from the recreational physical activity domain found individual flow to occur slightly more often with a co-participant than alone [15]. In terms of interdependent tasks, several studies have found that people experience individual flow in group settings, for instance, when playing in an interdependent music ensemble (e.g., [16]) or during interdependent sports team (e.g., football, rowing; [17, 18]). During such tasks, an individual may be in an individual flow state regardless of whether the individual’s co-participants or interdependent group members are in an individual flow state or not [9].
Besides these individual experiences, recent literature (e.g., [9, 14, 19]) assumes that a specific kind of flow can occur during group situations (i.e. group flow) that qualitatively differs from individual flow. This assumption is based on two sources. First, this assumption is based on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed evidence for a phenomenon of group flow gained from creative groups. For example, while studying individual flow, Sato [20] found that acting in creative motorcycle gangs evoked “a shared experience of collective effervescence” (p. 116). Collective effervescence, a sociological concept developed by Durkheim in the beginning of the 20th century, describes the excitement of participating in communal gatherings [21]. Second, the assumption is based on the results of noteworthy classic research from the field of social psychology. This research, as outlined by Walker [14], found that group contexts introduce many additional variables that cause individuals to act, think, and feel differently during group situations compared to solitary situations. Consequently, these variables and differences “may inhibit, facilitate, or transform flow experiences” ([14], p. 4). These issues suggest that group flow might exceed the simple experience of individual flow in a group setting.
In contrast to individual flow, group flow may comprise a specific experience of (being in a) group and an experience of interpersonal action as it takes place in a group situation. For these experiences to occur, there is the need for a group situation in which a group is (a) psychologically and physically present (i.e. it is not sufficient to have a group only psychologically present, as in the minimal-group-paradigm; e.g., [22]) and in which there is (b) an explicit group task (e.g., completing an interactive group task) or an implicit group task (e.g., everyone is doing a task on his/her own, but each individual is aware that the others are doing the same). A group situation such as this would inevitably establish an experience of group that may be specific under group flow.
I first ran into this concept via Jamie Wheal who has a consultancy around it: Flow Genome Project: Unlocking The Next Level Of Human Performance. His Homegrown Humans Newsletteris also interesting.
6 Diversity in teams
A big topic. See diversity in teams for more.
7 Office layouts
See ergonomics.
8 Performance reviews as a service
There is a whole industry around off-the-shelf tools to track team dynamics: CultureAmp, PeopleBox, Lattice, Reviewsnap/Trakstar…
Disclosure: Friends and family of mine have worked for CultureAmp.
9 Objectives Key Results framework
10 360 reviews
a.k.a. multi-rater feedback. A method of performance appraisal involving feedback from multiple sources, including supervisors, peers, subordinates, and customers. Potentially useful for many reasons, but in practice it is especially useful in organisations where people in authority have the power to insulate themselves from their subordinates’ feedback.
Lee (2015)
Center for Organizational Effectiveness > Multi-Rater 360 FeedbackTech
Marcus Buckingham bombastically advises best-practice survey design for such reviews:
[…] Although you are not a reliable rater of my behavior, you are an extremely reliable rater of your own feelings and emotions. This means that, although you cannot be trusted to rate me on “Marcus sets a clear vision for my team,” you can be relied upon to rate yourself on a statement such as “I know what the vision of my team is.” Likewise, while your ratings of me on “Marcus is a good listener” are bad data, your ratings of you on “I feel like my opinions are heard” are good data. This is true for any statement crafted so that it is asking you to rate you on you.
So, to create a reliable 360 survey, all you need do is cut out all the statements that ask the rater to evaluate others on their behaviors, and replace them with statements that ask the rater to evaluate himself on his own feelings.
Citation needed.
Peiperl (2001)
11 Incoming
NESCI teams research:
- Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, a Complexity Profile
- Educating Teams
- Functional and Social Team Dynamics in Industrial Settings
- Yaneer Bar-Yam, Ethical values: A multiscale scientific perspective
- Yaneer Bar-Yam Teams: A Manifesto
- Why Microsoft Measures Employee Thriving, Not Engagement