Managing Common Team Types

I’m studying Building High-Performing Teams on Coursera. These are my revision notes for week 5.

Remote Teams

• Half of US managers spend about half of their time on the road
• Remote teams amplify the challenges around good communication
  • It’s easier to miscommunicate
  • It’s harder to build trust
• Strategies to improve performance:
  • Have a face-to-face meeting as soon as possible, and schedule them regularly
    • Face-to-face helps establish a rapport and adjust to each others communication style.
    • Later, when communicating remotely, we still have a good sense of each other’s attitudes and feelings
    • GitHub has annual in-person meeting and a mandatory week at headquarters when first starting
  • Have a discussion where each person talks openly about their styles
    • Scenario: a more agressive communicator interacting witha more passive communicator:
      • the more aggressive communicator can come across as hostile, while they think they’re just acting normally
      • the more passive communicator can come across as unwilling to be honest and upfront about their opinions
      • If there is an open talk about how each person communicates, then people can have a better sense of the other’s intentions
    • It’s best to have these discussions during team chartering, when the group is first coming together
    • Use a communication style assessment:
      • DISC Survey
      • Persuasion Styles Assessmement (“The Art of Woo”, but Shell and Moussa)
      • Help each person reflect on their own style, and hence have a better discussion about styles
  • Building the water cooler
    • A place where people informally gather to take a break, make small talk and share ideas
    • Serves an important social function
    • Informal rapport building that occurs at the “water cooler” helps them to communicate more effectively in more formal work settings
    • For remote teams, there may be no natural place to gather
    • Need to be proactive in creating such a place in a virtual setting (“digital water cooler”)
    • GChat, Facebook chat, Slack
    • Dedicate the first few minutes of meetings for social time
    • Be very intential about creating an environment of good communication, as remote teams have fewer natural opportunities to do this

Startup Teams

• Dollar Shave:
  • Mark Levine and Michael Dublin dreamed up subscription service for discount razors delivered to doorstep
  • Company took off so quickly, they could barely keep pace with demand
• Other startups aren’t so lucky. They can crash and burn, and you must scramble just to keep the lights on
• It can feel like all your waking hours need to be focused on getting the work done
• However, you still have to pay attention to the teams’ interpersonal relationships
• A good cohesive team may be more important that having a great idea for a product or service
  • Good ideas happen all the time
  • What separates successful companies is the ability to implement the ideas
• Create check points for adjusting your team dynamic. There are three types:
  1. Engagement checkpoints
     • Establish times when you agree to check in on their level of involvement
     • The specific milestones depend upon their interests
       • e.g. hiring an administrative assistant who wants to work on coding software in the future, you might create a six-month checkpoint to discuss if that opportunity will actually open up for  them
  2. Problem checkpoints
     • Allow you to slow down from time to time and raise the yellow flag
       • Integrate (Jeremy Bloom)
         • Jeremry was more cautious, and he felt that his partner would often plough ahead, even when he was uncomfortable with the decision
         • Jeremy felt that his input was being ignored, so he created the “Yellow Flag” rating system
         • When the partners had to make a big decision, they would put a number on their level of their discomfort from 1 to 10
     • Quick way to surface disagreements, even when your team is moving at a fast pace
  3. Pivot checkpoints
     • A pivot is when you realise that you need to make a significant change in strategy, because:
       • something about your product or idea works really well, and you need to emphasise it
       • or it’s failing, and you need to go in a different direction
     • Tote (shopping app by Ben Silbermann)
       • Tote failed to catch on, except for one feature everyone loved: an option to pin and share products they loved with their friends
       • Silbermann made a pivot, and relaunched with that single feature at its core, called “Pinterest”
       • 2 years after launch, drawing 20 million visitors per month, valued at $1.5B.
     • At pivot checkpoint, decide if metrics require a change in strategy
     • When pivoting, set up a timeline and metrics to decide if new strategy is successful
• Focus on creating built-in checkpoints that trigger discussions about your group dynamic

Product Development Teams

• Group think is a major problem in product development teams
• IDEO:
  • design thinking process
  • no precise framework for innovation
  • starts with the understanding the needs of the people you are trying to serve, and the questions to ask
• The 6 core values of IDEO designers:
  1. Be optimistic
     • believe that anything is possible
     • designers have the freedom to explore and collaborate
  2. Clients are critical
     • they should be engaged at various points
  3. Take ownership – ask for forgiveness, not permission
     • designers are free to experiment
  4. Embrace anonymity as part of the process
     • the greater good of the team is more important than any individual contribution
  5. Learn from failure
     • there is no such thing as failure, as long as you’re learning from it
  6. Make other people successful
     • talk less, and do more
• The goal is to get all the ideas on the table, and then to execute on them.
• IDEO’s 6 principles
  1. Defer judgement
  2. Encourage wild ideas
  3. Build on the ideas of others
  4. Stay focused on the topic
  5. Be visual
  6. Go for quantity
     • there are no bad ideas
• Sacrificial concept: a concept that may not make a lot of sense or is really basic, shared publicly to get help get as many other ideas out as possible
• It is the large number of ideas (rather than any individual ideas) that make the process effective
• Guidelines for setting roles within teams
  1. What skill sets are needed for the project
  2. Its initial goals
  3. The project leader on the client side
• Ideas happen on the intersection of desirability, feasibility and viability
  • Desirability: asking important questions about what people want when it comes to products.
    • Peoples needs can be broken up into 3 groups:
      • emotional
      • cognitive
      • physical
  • Feasibility: coming up with concepts based on insights from research
    • e.g. what are technical constraints that might present an issue?
  • Viability: an assessment of if it makes sense for business to implement the concepts

IDEO’s Research Methods for Product Development Teams

• The Times newspaper came to IDEO with a problem in membership:
  • IDEO determined user experience issues was more important challenge to tackle in order to increase membership
  • After an in-depth research process, IDEO helped to come up with a concept that was desirable, feasible and viable.
• Research methods
  1. Customer interviews
     • e.g. if IDEO is researching refridgerators, they may go shopping with a customer, and ask them questions about their habits
     • Curious about the multi-layered context in which people live and eat
     • Allows capture of smaller and more precise details that might not come out in a survey
  2. Analogous research
     • What are parallel organisations that might provide insight into my organisation’s challenge?
     • What are similar challenges others in the industry have overcome?
     • e.g. in creating a new Playstation game, IDEO researchers took Playstation players to a dance class. Asking questions about what problems they had, the researcher was able to infer similar problems that people new to gaming would have
  3. Experts in the field
     • Interview those in similar or separate fields
     • Insights from the field, and possibly allow collaboration
• 3 methods allow triangulation and synthesise data in order to determine next steps
• Allows developement of stories and setting of goals, roles and norms of product development effort
• Design and prototype allows high quality feedback on initial design
• Use methods to draw on others creativity, and ensuring they don’t shut down potentially valuable ideas and contribution
• Methods provide a thorough and psychologically safe way to vet ideas
• Key lessons:
  • ask the right questions
  • prototype your ideas
  • collect feedback
  • learn from failure

Committees

• Committees: teams of people brought together for goals outside of their normal day job
• Performance tends to suffer because of lack of engagement
• High performance is possible if you align committee goals with personal goals
• Common issues on committees:
  1. Committee members have other obligations that often take a high priority
  2. Committee members may not know the charge
     • aligning their own goals with the committee goals can be a challenge
• Case study:
  • Committee in north-east US university
  • Comprised of faculty, staff and students
  • Charged to enhance campus and community life
  • Goal setting through a mix of charges from executives, and those set by the committee itself
  • People can set 3-5 short term goals per year
    • e.g. issues related to location of university, or the life of the university itself
    • e.g. research student health costs in theoperations of health insurance outside of the university
  • Deadlines for committee are not strict
  • Goals might roll over from year to year
  • Committment to goals is inspired by:
    1. Opportunity to learn
    2. Satisfaction of accomplishing goals
    3. Opportunity to have a voice
  • Passion for the committee comes from the fulfillment of personal goals of committee members
  • There is potential for private interests to overtake the greater good of the group
  • Structured reflection allows the team to come up with a strategy to correct bias
    • e.g. outside surveys
    • Rules for checks and balances
  • Norms determine roles because committee roles are fluid depending upon who is on the committee, and what the task is
  • It is important to have a process for checking in

Norm Setting for Committees

• 4 strategies:
  1. Pay attention to communication channels
     • Establish how you will communicate and how often
     • e.g. “communication will take place in person at monthly meetings, with occasional follow up by email”
     • Effective communication doesn’t mean you have to constantly communicate. Rather, when you are together, you are open to suggestions, ask questions and prevent miscommunication
  2. Encourage information sharing
     • Members have different backgrounds
     • Need to understand what contextual information is needed to ensure mutual understanding
     • Take and share meeting minutes
  3. Establish subcommittees
     • Allows committee members to maximise their limited time and focus in an area to make a high impact
     • Each subcommittee should establish their own goals, roles and norms, and align with the task at hand
  4. Have respectful disagreements
     • be aware of the danger of minimising contributions from minorities, women, and other marginalised groups on committees
     • encouraging members to remain open to one another’s viewpoints
     • Get in the habit of saying “In my experience” before giving an opinion, which ensure the option is not assigned to the committee as a while

Committees (Reading)

• Committees that work
  • Gather facts, then establish procedures
  • Design committees like an architect
  • Assign people to committees carefully—and set them up to succeed
  • Run committees using best-practice disciplines

Building a Strong Startup Team Culture

• No time for team building? Three ways to keep your startup’s culture on track in tough times
  • Participation checkpoints: Create ground rules
  • Problem checkpoints: Raise the yellow flag
  • Pivot checkpoints: Prepare to fail

How to be the Best Virtual Teammate

• Working remotely? How to be the best virtual teammate
  • Build trust early
  • Be explicit about expectations
  • Check in frequently

How to Innovate Like an Olympian

• 3 Ways to Innovate Like an Olympian at the Office
  • Seek group support for your individual creativity.
  • Build on the innovation that others have already discovered
  • Dream, and then work like crazy