Teams come in all shapes and sizes

Regardless of size, there is commonality between all successful teams.

The third of each three-week module at Flatiron is dedicated to project week, where you are randomly paired up with another student in your cohort and get set to work showcasing everything you’ve learned in the past two weeks.

It is where the shackles come off and the imagination takes off. And, more importantly to future endeavours, it is where you really get hone your pair-programming skills.

This is now the third project week I’ve done, and, rather unusually, I’ve been in a different size team for each one. For Mod 1, my partner Angie and I wrote Kindr, the baby-naming CLI app you never knew you needed (more about that process here). We learnt that taking breaks was vital for both clarity and sanity.

For mod 2 we had an odd number in our cohort, and I was paired in a three with the lovely Joaquin and Oli. Together we made HuYu, an online version of that old classic game Guess Who. We struck up a good balance of collaboration (during the initial setup, and when creating anything that would majorly affect the structure) and splitting off into solo side-projects.

This mod, after a slight hiccup in the code challenge, I am paired up with… myself.

But what this week has really got me thinking about (instead of (just) playing air drums and downing pints of wine in my pjs) was the value and nature of teamwork, and what the common traits are in successful teams of any size. In the future, as real-life coders, we’ll be working in teams of anywhere from 1 to 1000, so it’s vital to understand how you can get the best out of yourself and others when working in a team, when asked to lead a team or when working solo.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s teams never knew when to stop. It’s a trait he ruthlessly drilled into his teams over his decades at Manchester United. The most famous — and best — example of this is their 1999 Champions League final win over Bayern Munich, when they scored two goals in the last three minutes of injury time to come from behind and win.

Fergie also didn’t know when to give up. He once boycotted the BBC, due to a dispute over a documentary about his son, for seven years. For seven whole years he refused to give a single interview to the biggest broadcaster in his team’s country.

If your leader turns up late day-to-day, the team will see this as acceptable and also turn up late. If your leader is stressed about a big project, that stress will manifest itself throughout the team. But if your leader is organised and encouraging, leads by example and cares about the work, so will the team.

In programming terms, it is inheritance. It’s important to remember that leaders come in all forms — not just the official, appointed leaders (managers). The leadership group sets the tone, which leads us to…

Imagine putting 11 footballers on a pitch and asking them to play a game. The first thing they’ll do is work out what position everyone is playing in. They’ll also want to know what formation the team is setting up, and what the ultimate aim is (presumably, in this case, to score more goals than the other team).

Everyone in the team should have clearly defined responsibilities. And with great responsibility comes… great ownership. If someone knows what is required of them in their role, if there has been a sign-off from all parties that what is expected of them is achievable, if they know how that role fits in to the wider picture, then they will buy in to not only that role, but the role of the team too. With that, comes ownership. And with ownership across all positions comes the sense of the team, of all pulling together in the same direction, for the common good.

What’s more, if you also know what everyone else in your team’s responsibilities are, and they know yours, then you can not only understand how what you’re doing fits in with everyone else, but should make you that little bit more empathetic.

This one I reckon is vital, but often overlooked. You’ve got to be able to say things to each other. A environment where one person is too scared to raise a point, or too intimidated to ask a question, is not going to be a productive environment for long.

Ask questions of each other, and get to know your co-workers, leaders or staff. All of them. The more conversations you’re having at a base level, the more chance you’ll have of being able to raise the more tricky issues — if and when they arise.

Foster an environment where problems can be talked about, and where those tricky issues are tackled head on when they are small minnows, not left to fester and grow into mammoth whales.

Get to know the people around you. The more you know what drives them, the more you’ll know how to get the best out of them, the quicker you’ll recognise if they’re struggling, and the more invested you’ll be in making the project a success.

This is a great piece on what tools there are around to help work out how people tick, and how you can adapt your styles to work with potential differences, not against.

In your experience, what attributes do successful teams have? Are there some that work well in one kind of team but not in others?

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