How does a group develop integrity – wholeness, cohesion, unity? How does it become a team? Last time I talked about trust and shared values in accountability, performance, and communication. Let’s keep drilling in.
There needs to be clarity on roles and responsibilities. There is dynamism here … rigidly defined roles with rigidly specified responsibilities fail in a world where different people bring different strengths (and weaknesses) to the table.
Roles will – or should – generally define what the person with that role is expected to produce during different stages of the SDLC (software development life cycle). The role imparts the responsibility to the person with the role. Before a person is assigned (or accepts) a role, the person should know what responsibilities they are shouldering.
Senior engineering responsibilities include mentoring junior engineers … one problem with an ad hoc development team is that there is no sense of permanence … not that anything is really permanent these days … but there is no sense of continuity … no sense that things will continue on after our involvement has ended.
There also needs to be clarity on authority. Team and project management generally rely on authority rather than persuasion to get things done. A self-directed team will exercise that authority over its own activities … but that team needs to be above average before it is truly capable of self-direction.
Finally, what should be done about “social loafers” or “toxic team members?” I want to spend some time on communication so “toxicity” is going to have to have its own blog post …
So … communication
A gelled team communicates. That is probably a no-brainer, but you may be surprised at how little (or how badly) most people communicate.
Communication has 4 aspects:
- Transmission (w/ medium) – generally, in technology, speaking/writing … much more generally, it includes art, music, etc. But we are engineers, not musicians … on the job, anyway.
2. Reception (w/ medium) – perceptually that is hearing/seeing, with luck (and some training) it is listening and reading with comprehension.
3. Cognition – the often neglected art of thinking before speaking and writing or while (and after) listening and reading. You know you haven’t finished listening until you have reflected on what you heard … absent that reflection you never finish listening to what you heard.
4. Attention – focuses the mind. You see (or hear) what you focus on … not vice versa
If your attention is focused on thinking about what you are going to say rather than receiving what is being said to you then you are hearing but you are not listening.
People are immersed – drowning – in an ocean of “communication” these days.
We get a tsunami of content – both audio and visual – from our environment. But it is mostly noise with some few signals sprinkled in.
Signal to noise ratio measures the relative strength of the meaningful (signals) compared to the meaningless (noise). The internet has a horrible signal-to-noise ratio.
So … the real question becomes … what is your personal signal-to-noise ratio?
Mindful communication encourages us to ask whether what we are about to share is “true, necessary, and kind” … we should add “does it improve on the silence?” If we could get some silence, that is.