get better at teamwork

in a group has one consistent feature: conflict! My natural response would be to stay away from conflicts. Most of the time, I don’t have a strong opinion (for better or worse), so staying clear from conflicts has not been too hard to do… manageable compromises, fine! But this time, I am in a different situation: have to make it work between other people who disagree strongly with each other. This needs a different type of compromise: stepping into the cross-fire, and I find it really hard to do.

I don’t have too much trouble listening to others vent or complain, but I do have a tough time identifying what makes them get mad at each other. My poor engineer brain asks them what they need and tries to allocate resources for their (emotional) demands… such a futile effort! From neutral grounds, it seems like each person has sensitivities that he/she is not willing to back down from. Then comes the expectation that those concerns be considered by ALL, and if they are not, retaliation, and that’s when things get ugly. Conflict management is not what I’m good at, and apparently, the good old suggestion to take it easy has serious limitations.

For now, I have been asking everybody to focus on the tasks in hand, and leave anything personal out. But I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen once the task is done!

that I pay more attention to this, I can see more clearly that the way I work is not particularly team-friendly. I frequently skip documenting the details of what I do, and to do things I also sometimes use equivalent routes that are not strictly accurate but get the job done (these shortcuts are particularly annoying for others, for sure). The result is when the task division is done, the pieces keep coming back to me for “clarification.” _{I wonder if I do it on purpose!} I think it’d be a good practice to do things considering that somebody else should be able to make something out of them. Proper documentation, enough notes and comments, and organizing the project flow… that’s the plan for now.

with students needs a great deal of flexibility, that much I can say! I’ve been working more or less directly with three students, and they pretty much cover the entire spectrum of independence: one works on his own and only comes to me when needs something. One asks for more attention and wants to confirm steps with me. But the third one simply doesn’t do anything more than what I directly ask for, and it’s a challenge for me! You see, I tend to give them space to work on their own, and in this case that strategy simply doesn’t work.

I feel a little bad about this, on one side, I don’t think micro-management is the right approach for grad students, but on the other hand, I feel responsible for the slow progress (which will hurt the student, the project, and me!). I will give this some more thoughts, but from the outlook, I think I have to give in, and (as much as I dislike it) prepare a list of tasks and follow it up directly in this case.

I do whatever pleases me (well, in my work, and only within a very narrow window of tasks, but still). When working by myself, that seems to work just fine… I jump from one task to another, and all of them are towards a defined goal. However, the situation gets far from idea when other people are involved (“Remind me again… why are we doing this now?” is not a good question to come up frequently).

I have to make sure the overall plan is clear for everybody, and that everybody is on the same page as far as the tasks are concerned. Multitasking and spontaneity are fine, but disturbing other people’s concentration and plan is not.

It’s somehow related to the previous one, well, I think along with taking up extra responsibilities, I sometime go extra steps to protect others from “low” labors (low pay-off tasks that nonetheless have to be done). A more balanced approach distributes responsibilities in all aspects among the team members. Everybody deserves to get a taste of the “dirty” side of the job too, right?

I have to practice trusting juniors and giving them more important stuff. It’s probably true that in the short term for me the fastest way to get something done is to do it myself (wow, my huge ego was just revealed!), but there is just so much that one can achieve by himself.

A little bit of sharing and a little bit of trusting for now… even if it means that not everything will be done my way :)