In her lightning talk at SDEC 2012, Trish Rempel talks about the crucial components of an effective team, and shares a few tips on cultivating positive team culture and collaboration.

1. “A group becomes a team when each member is sure enough of himself and his
contribution to praise the skills of the others.”
This is a quote by Norman Shidle, but I don’t know if I quite agree with it.
In the IT industry, many of us are quite confident in our abilities, perhaps a bit too much;
but this sense of professional pride can make us mistrustful of others and see asking for
help as a sign of weakness.
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2. So, for a great team to flourish, its members need to maintain a balance of confidence
and humility, initiative and dependence.
Each member has a sense of responsibility to the team, and will not only fulfill her role
with diligence, but will go beyond her role where needed, with the confidence that her
teammates will do the same.
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3. But the goal is not to become the Borg. For those not as enamoured with Star Trek as I
am, they are cyborg drones acting as part of a collective but with no individual thoughts
of their own.
Teams need diverse personalities, skills, and experience to effectively solve problems
and reach greater creative potential.
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4. Teams are like families; some are more dysfunctional than others. A team with a lot of
dysfunction will have a buildup of poisonous attitudes, ineffective communication, and
an avoidance of confronting the real issues at all costs.
An effective team will deliberately focus on building a positive culture that encourages
bonding and trust, to the point where team members can feel comfortable with
addressing issues without offending anybody.
It all starts with having a vision of the culture you want to foster, and modeling it. The
more people you have on board, the better, but you can start positively influencing team
culture even if you’re the only one trying.
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5. The largest barriers to an effective team are silos. They may be bureaucratic chains of
communication, departmental separations, or developers being tasked alone with
features or even entire projects. These invisible walls can cause a sense of personal
territories being drawn, with the corporation a battlefield. Rather than working together,
people end up spending energy defending their turf and passing blame over the lines.
On top of that, if developers end up “owning” huge chunks of code, you run into several
problems. If only one person is working on the code, it inevitably falls in decay and the
dev might not even notice it happening. As time goes on, it isn’t worth the ramp-up time
to assign another dev, so when the owner is over-resourced, you have a bottleneck
problem. Finally, if that person were ever to leave the organization, you would have a
huge training problem on your hands.
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6. The key to taking down silos and building team trust is to get people working together,
open up communication, and encourage collaboration.
Here are some of my tips for accomplishing this, but they are not hard and fast rules;
take and adapt whatever makes sense for your team.
- Ideally, all stakeholders should be co-located or readily available.
- Consider having an open plan office space, or at least turn cubicles around so that it’s
easier to talk.
- Use an instant messaging tool, even if you’re all co-located
- Try pair-programming, especially for cross-training, design, and solving problems
- Use remote desktop sharing software for pair programming and collaboration,
especially with remote members
- Consider having regular code reviews as a team or one-on-one for more collaboration
and cross-training
- Try using kanban, and if you have remote members, find a good virtual kanban board
- Try to get to a point where anyone can pick up a task from any project, you will have
fewer bottlenecks and more consistent velocity
- If you have any shy or really talkative team members, try silent brainstorming to bring
out equal participation and more results
- Learn and have fun together; have lunch n’ learns with pizza and webcasts, share
interesting articles, go to user group meetings and conferences together
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7. Finally, a team will only stay effective if it continuously evaluates and seeks to improve
itself. As a team, set goals for the year and check on a regular basis that you’re on track
to achieving them. Keep on the lookout for issues that creep up and cause cracks in
team morale, and root them out.
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8. In summary, to build a great team, you need to foster a positive, trusting culture by
living it yourself and modeling humility, dependence, and graciousness to each member.
Take down cultural and organizational silos where you see them and encourage open
communication and collaboration. Keep the team effective by setting goals together and
improving continuously.
If you would like to continue this discussion, I would be glad to chat in between
sessions, or feel free to contact me.
Does anyone have any questions at this time?
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