- Our work is often only as good as
the working relationship within the team.
Setting up that relationship well at the start of a project
and along the way can be easy for leaders to forget to do
or feel we already know each other well enough
that we don't need to do it.
This means teams often kickoff projects or phases of work
focused on the product or the goals
and the needs of the people who use it
but without aligning on the team member goals
and the team member needs.
This team self-awareness is particularly important
in the context of design thinking
where people from different disciplines are collaborating
in experimental iterations filled
with a lot of creative ambiguity
where we need to trust each other's intentions
in order to manage the frustration that will show up.
There are many avoidable issues that can arise
over the course of a project.
I'm sure you've heard variations of:
"I didn't know you were going to be on vacation
"the week before we present to the CEO"
or "I'm trying to get better at research,
"and I'd hoped someone would have coached me on my style"
or "everyone's an extrovert, and I'm not.
"I had a hard time getting a word in edgewise"
or worse for team trust:
"Joe doesn't believe in what we're doing.
"He's always late to our meetings."
So I recommend that before you start any major project
and when you bring new team members on
you take the time to formally get to know each other
and what you all seek from doing the project together.
There are many ways and approaches
for sharing these perspectives with each other.
The key element of this relationship building
is that it should focus on the team as individuals,
rather than on the program goals.
For example, the activity should ask:
what do you hope to get out of this effort?
Rather than: what do you see as the mission for this effort?
The 3 things I recommend any team alignment cover are:
the personal goals and objectives for each person,
their personal working styles and their pet peeves,
and their personal needs that touch on the effort.
Understanding each of these elements for your teammates
will help build trust in each other,
and this trust is crucial when the team
gets into the complexity of a hard problem
and the stress of deadlines loom.
This need exists even for teams
where you know each other well
and may think you're all aligned.
Even if you worked on the same team for years,
things change.
It might be something in your family life.
It might be a career goal or even a commitment
to a new spin class that starts early in the evening.
Let me give you an example.
I was recently working on some educational software.
It was a big, messy problem with lots of people involved:
teachers, principals, students, parents,
and the company we were working with.
It had a lot of research and a relatively fast timeline
to turn around something great.
So we were bringing somebody new onto the team,
and we decided to do the team leap activity
that I'll share with you in another section of this course.
Through that activity,
one of the team members who had felt to me
like he really was engaged with the process
and was on board with how we were working
said that he was really struggling,
he was stressed, and he wanted more structure in the team.
So we took that opportunity to talk about it,
and we decided to try limiting
our open collaboration times
to about 50 minutes each,
and then focus on the next 15 minutes after that
to documenting what we'd learned from those last 50 minutes.
I found that that practice helped me remember
to step back to the big picture from the details
and for all of us, at the end of each day,
we could literally see everything that we'd accomplished.
So as a leader of design thinking,
you need to support an environment of trust
that enables good collaboration across the disciplines
and sets the stage for creative experimentation
and open thinking.