Whatif… Teamwork was Fun?
Almost every person I come across has a story about a terrible team experience. A teammate who failed to show up or contribute, vast differences of opinion that led to more arguments than productive work, unnecessary meetings or work discussion that failed to produce anything valuable. And often the experience is so problematic that I’ve known people who have physical manifestations of their frustration: stomachaches, depression, defensiveness…. Kind of sounds miserable, yes?
It’s funny to me that, generally speaking, our solution to helping people learn how to work in teams is to throw them into one and expect them to “figure it out”. This starts fairly early - often in elementary school. However, I’ve really seen it come to a head in college - especially more recently and especially (although not exclusively) in business schools.
In addition to the problem of failing to give people the tools to work as effectively team members, we also often see projects that aren’t really “team” projects in nature. Think back to one of your team school projects - if you had more time, could you have completed that project on your own? Probably.
Given all of this, could we find a way to make teamwork more fun? Sure! I’ll offer a few suggestions based on what we know about effective teamwork.
Define the team
A team (according to Richard Hackman) is defined as two or more people working interdependently toward a shared goal. If you don’t in some way “need” each other, you’re not really a team. In organizations, we may see a team that is, let’s say, developing a drug. This team needs scientists, project managers, sales, people, etc. That fits the definition of team. However, in organizations we silo people so they don’t really work independently. In a class project, you might have people coming together and meeting regularly, but the work isn’t really interdependent (meaning you don’t really need each of those people to do the work).
Develop effective team skills
The most effective teams spend time getting to know each other and building meaningful relationships. Google ran a series of research studies to better understand effective teamwork. One of the most important elements of effective teamwork is psychological safety - which is creating a space where people feel confident to engage in interpersonal risk taking. This means you are comfortable with disagreement and can respectfully engage in debate. Teams that performed better had more conversational turn taking, meaning people contributed equally. This doesn’t necessarily mean you measure exact number of words, rather find ways to encourage input from everyone. Finally, they demonstrated high levels of social sensitivity - they engaged in perspective taking and empathy.
Develop and practice improved interpersonal conversation skills
Judith Glaser coined the term “Conversational Intelligence” and in her work she identified how we can have better interpersonal communication which is the building block of culture. In her work, she identified how we can move from transactional to positional to transformational conversations - shifting from protecting our ideas to co-creating knowledge with others. This requires consistent active listening, asking thoughtful and open questions, and leaning away from fear and toward bonding.
So what can you do today to start to move from a rough team experience to one in which teamwork is more fun? Think about the structure of the project - how can you make it more interdependent. Start focusing on creating a safe space starting with one relationships at a time. And use what you know about conversational intelligence to move from protection to co-creation.
No team experience will be perfect. There is no such thing. But we can use what we know about working effectively in teams to improve the experience. Whatif…. teamwork could be fun?