Colleagues
How to help your colleagues perform better with the meta-problem
Most of us do our work as part of a team. Navigating team dynamics, including your own role within the team, can pose some tricky dilemmas. The meta-problem process can help you resolve them.
Teams, like organizations are united by a common goal. Ideally, everyone on the team understands that common goal, and their personal role in helping the group accomplish it.
Not every group that looks like a team is a team. One of the first dilemmas you’ll face when joining a new group of colleagues is figuring out whether they know how to act as a team. How well do they collaborate? Do they know how to bring out the best in each other? Can they critique each other’s work in a way that generates new options rather than conflict? Where are the decision-making boundaries?
Goals (theirs and yours)
Goals can unite a team and magnify its problem-solving powers, or they can completely ruin the team’s effectiveness if they are not aligned. There are three sets of goals that need to complement each other – your own, your individual colleagues’, and the collective goal of the team.
“Never assume” is a good rule in life and in your work. It’s important to check that your colleagues have a shared understanding of the collective team goal, and to check the team’s work constantly against that goal. Do you have the right set of colleagues on the team (skills, etc)? What is the best us of your skills?
Ideally the team would decide together on the right solution based on how it will help not only the team goal, but individual people's goals too. Consider these scenarios:
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Should we use this project to learn a new (and more risky) technology? It depends on the skills on the team, if people want to give it a try, how risky it is really, how important the project is, and probably a variety of other things that members of the team can prioritize and decide based on.
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Should we assign the junior person to lead this project, or someone more senior? It depends what other projects the team is supporting, how much time everyone has available, how well the junior / senior person will be able to run the project, how important the project is, and many other criteria the team may consider.
Developmental needs (theirs and yours)
Teams, and the individuals on them, all need to grow and acquire new skills. Many of your teammates will also have career ambitions. It’s helpful to think about the goal you are working towards as a group, and ask if there are opportunities in the work to develop you and your colleagues professionally.
Working styles
We each have our own way of working, and a team must be able to accommodate that variety without compromising the collective goals or creating tension. How healthy are the working relationships between colleagues on the team? How compatible are the individual working styles? Who tends to dominate in meetings, who looks for ways to build, who is a constructive critical thinker, etc? What role should you play in the team?
Weighing results versus effort
The simplest way to help your colleagues use the meta-problem is to help frame decisions people are debating in terms of goals and effort. When people are torn between different options, you can ask "which of these options is likely to deliver the most progress towards our goal, for the least effort?”
Making your choice explicitly about the costs and benefits of the different options makes it easier to see the situation clearly. Sometimes the biggest insight is that no one wanted to pick one of the options you had because they were all lousy. Once you've made that realization, everyone can focus on finding better options instead.
If you have a challenge with your team and you'd like to see how you can use the meta-problem to help you navigate it, or if you would like to engage me to help, click on "Contact" and send me a note!