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Introducing: The Multi-talented Work Teams of the Future

1. A group is not the same as a team.
It has become fashionable to speak of one’s staff as “my team”, or “our team” and of its members as “team mates”. Calling it so, however, doesn’t make it so. There’s more to teamwork than numbers. The key difference is in the level of interaction and interdependence of team members. For a group of people to become a team, their work behaviors must change, in the understanding that they need each other’s contributions to successfully complete the tasks at hand. Knowledge workers (Software engineers, technical writers and illustrators, marketing folks, information designers, interaction designers, and the business owners and project managers) must increasingly become interdependent to meet the needs of the organization and its customers.

For this interdependence to take hold, and for interdisciplinary teams to function, barriers must come down, territories must be relinquished, and frank and open discussion must replace the often defensive responses to feedback—whether on content or style.

What used to be a key positive quality in knowledge workers: the good ones felt a sense of ownership for their part of the project, is rapidly becoming a liability. See also my next point:

2. Working in the same area, but each in their own cubicle is not conducive to collaboration
As a method to maximize the number of people per sq. ft., the cubicle has no equal. As a method to shut one’s self off from one’s surroundings, to barricade one’s self within a cocoon of “my space”, complete with the trappings of home (photos of loved ones, be they children or pets, strings of Christmas lights, humorous figurines, in short “personality") the cubicle has no equal, either.

I’m going to say it as plainly as I can: in an interconnected workplace, where collaboration is the goal and the norm: the cubicle has had its day; it must go.

Frankly, cubicle-dwelling discourages and even stifles the kind of cross-over involvement necessary for collaboration. To collaborate with others, you need to know what they’re doing; you need to be able to eavesdrop on their telephone conversations, you need to be able to pull up a chair and join a discussion taking place between a team mate and a content specialist. For the creative potential of collaboration to be realized, you need to be facing one another, not holed up in a box, with your backs turned to each other. Check out what these folks have to say about the cubicle: Design Lines Blog

The good news: this is easy to do: have all the hutches, panels and dividers removed, and group desks in threes and fours. Shove all the storage and filing cabinets to one or two of the outside walls of the area. Create a reference library area (bookshelves) with one or more tables and some chairs somewhere in the middle, and designate this area as the collaborative meeting area, as well. And close your ears and minds to the deafening howls of protest. Just do it, make it a group activity, with everyone pitching in, and explain why. Explain often, and praise everyone for trying hard. Encourage discussion about the pros and cons, and point out the benefits whenever you can. Do what you need to do, but don’t back down. This is the layout of the collaborative team—the team of the future.

3. Privacy and quiet are overrated; if you want privacy—don’t come to work.

Knowledge workers (software engineers, creatives, writers) have maintained that—in order to produce—they need privacy and a quiet environment. Perhaps because these professions have an overrepresentation of people with an MBTI preference for introversion, this line has been swallowed like the gospel. Strange, then, that journalists—writers, too—can function perfectly well in a noisy newsroom, with phones ringing off the hook, printers whirring away, people walking by their desks talking, and assorted deadline-driven mayhem around them. Likewise, manufacturing engineers can do their jobs just fine in the midst of the clanging, whirring, banging and humming environment of a production plant.

Collaboration is about looking over the fence, not at it.

Certainly, there are times when people legitimately need some distraction-free time—but that’s not all the time. In the new world of collaboration, a distraction-free zone may only be necessary for a few hours per week. For instance: to work out a rough first draft of notes taken during a development meeting—perhaps for 3 hours. And perhaps once again, if a final—definitive—edit needs to be done, maybe another 2 hours?  In other words, instead of ‘leaving your individual work area (cubicle)’ to ‘go to a meeting with your team’, you will temporarily ‘leave your collaborative work area’ to ‘work on your own for a few hours’. Management guru Tom Davenport has even compiled all the research on this topic: Tom Davenport on Collaboration and Office Design

This legitimate need for a distraction-free zone is equally easy to address. Create one or two areas, set back from the main hustle and bustle area, where one can temporarily sit and work in relative quiet and isolation, until the task is done. Don’t create too many of these areas—they need to be a scarce commodity that your people must share. No need for any kind of storage capability in these areas—no-one will stay there long enough to need storage. Just a desk, a chair, a networked computer - or just an Ethernet cable to hook up a laptop. Simple. If your company can go wireless: even better.

Collaboration is more than working in the same area; it is more than sharing resources. True collaboration involves getting to know all aspects of the work, your own, and those of your collaborators. And thinking about, commenting on, and contributing to areas that are not within your primary scope of expertise—simply because you are a collaborator, and therefore it’s your work, too. Agile software development already operates on many of these principles, and can be a great model to expand outside of a particular job group, to include other disciplines.

How will you know when you’re there? When your people comment freely and constructively on each other’s work, when a SME offers to come and sit with a writer during an editing round, when an illustrator offers to go down to the production floor to see and capture with her own eyes how the product is manufactured. The key words are: “freely” and “offer”.

Collaboration is the strategy to develop self-directed and self-managing multi-disciplinary teams: the multi-talented work teams of the future.

Last updated on May 03, 2009 at 12:13 PM
Category: Leadership Development Managing Change Human Performance Improvement Team Role Dynamics
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