Teamwork
January 26, 2020 — June 22, 2023
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There is some famous Google research on psychological safety in teams (not peer-reviewed, mind).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
5 Diversity in teams
A big topic. See diversity in teams for more.
6 Office layouts
See ergonomics.
7 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.
8 Objectives Key Results framework
9 360 reviews
a.k.a. multi-rater feedback.
Lee (2015)
Center for Organizational Effectiveness > Multi-Rater 360 FeedbackTech
The Fatal Flaw with 360 Surveys has a bombastic title, but a short useful bit of survey design advice at the end
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.
Peiperl (2001)
10 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