As we approach the first official delivery of the automated laboratory system on which I have been working on for the past couple of years with my colleagues I realized some important conclusions about working in a team.
I realized now that all of us from my team have kind of grown together over the past couple of years. All those challenging situations, funny moments and hard work have brought us together without us even knowing. When I first started in this team, we were all quite different and initially kind of cold to each other. Especially my boss but I think that is expected since he is in a delicate position and so I understand him.
But as we worked more and more together, we kind of slowly started opening up. I realized then that it's not enough just to be colleagues in order for a team to work. You actually need to see everyone as a bit of a friend. Why you ask me? Because only then you will feel free to collaborate with other people to work together on something. I noticed that when there were 2 codependent tasks and you gave them to people that weren't that close, a lot of miscommunication happened which caused those 2 tasks not to meet the requirements. And it's pretty simple, those 2 persons didn't see themselves as friends and were reluctant to communicate to each other the issues that arouse. In the end, each person fixed the issues that arouse in their own way and imagined that the other person came up with the same idea. So the feature which they worked on, didn't work at all as expected and another task had to be made to resolve the conflicting solutions to issues between the previous 2 tasks.
And I noticed that there is a lot more to a team than meets the eye. You might think that if all the team members are on the same page and come up with the same ideas then that's a good thing. Well, it's kind of wrong. If everyone on a team has the same ideas then there are fewer overall ideas in the team. In the complex world of software development you need as many ideas as possible because of the wide range of problems that we have to solve. So in a team you should have as many people with different ideas as you can. But the problem is that 2 people with very different ideas will find it harder to communicate to one another because they aren't exactly on the same page. If their ideas are so different they will spend more time explaining their ideas to each other. Ideally there should always be some sort of friction in a team in order to produce good ideas. You should have enough diversity in a team while retaining good communication between members.
In time a team tends to become more homogenous. This means that communication between members improves but the number of ideas dwindle. I think this is why in big companies with many teams it is actually encouraged to swap members between teams.
I realized now that all of us from my team have kind of grown together over the past couple of years. All those challenging situations, funny moments and hard work have brought us together without us even knowing. When I first started in this team, we were all quite different and initially kind of cold to each other. Especially my boss but I think that is expected since he is in a delicate position and so I understand him.
But as we worked more and more together, we kind of slowly started opening up. I realized then that it's not enough just to be colleagues in order for a team to work. You actually need to see everyone as a bit of a friend. Why you ask me? Because only then you will feel free to collaborate with other people to work together on something. I noticed that when there were 2 codependent tasks and you gave them to people that weren't that close, a lot of miscommunication happened which caused those 2 tasks not to meet the requirements. And it's pretty simple, those 2 persons didn't see themselves as friends and were reluctant to communicate to each other the issues that arouse. In the end, each person fixed the issues that arouse in their own way and imagined that the other person came up with the same idea. So the feature which they worked on, didn't work at all as expected and another task had to be made to resolve the conflicting solutions to issues between the previous 2 tasks.
And I noticed that there is a lot more to a team than meets the eye. You might think that if all the team members are on the same page and come up with the same ideas then that's a good thing. Well, it's kind of wrong. If everyone on a team has the same ideas then there are fewer overall ideas in the team. In the complex world of software development you need as many ideas as possible because of the wide range of problems that we have to solve. So in a team you should have as many people with different ideas as you can. But the problem is that 2 people with very different ideas will find it harder to communicate to one another because they aren't exactly on the same page. If their ideas are so different they will spend more time explaining their ideas to each other. Ideally there should always be some sort of friction in a team in order to produce good ideas. You should have enough diversity in a team while retaining good communication between members.
In time a team tends to become more homogenous. This means that communication between members improves but the number of ideas dwindle. I think this is why in big companies with many teams it is actually encouraged to swap members between teams.
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