Working as part of a team

Be Open to Others’ Suggestions

Everyone on your team has different views, has different skills, and has a unique way of approaching problems. Genuinely listen to them and realize that they may have valuable insight that you may have overlooked or not seriously considered. You don’t want to be so tunnel-visioned that you miss the opportunity to learn something new.

Including your teammates also promotes feelings of value across the team, too.

Running an Effective Meeting

Just about everyone hates meetings. You will be in meetings, probably more than you want to be.

If you find yourself running a meeting, keep a few things in mind to make it suck a little less.

Have a clear purpose for your meeting and state what it is at the beginning.

The purpose of this meeting is ___. By the end of it we should have ___.
Use a “parking lot” to keep your meeting focused and on-track.

That’s a great point, and I think that’s important for us to discuss. To keep this meeting short, I’d like to put it in the parking lot and I promise we’ll come back to it. Would that be okay?
Take notes for yourself and as a recap in case anyone couldn’t attend. Any action items that come out of your meeting have to be written down somewhere. Save your meeting notes in a folder in case you need to reference decisions made.
Follow up on these action items. If nothing happens after the meeting, then it probably wasn’t necessary to begin with.
Nobody hates meetings that end early. If you are only halfway through your allotted time but hit all the goals you intended, end it!

Know Your Team’s Value in the Overall Company

When you understand how your team (and yourself) fit into the company’s overall vision, you can appreciate and value the work that you and your team do on a daily basis. This applies to you as an individual contributor as well, but as part of a team you can help shape your team’s vision, goals, and overall attitude to align with the business. This will show leadership and “being a team player” to your boss, but also feel great personally when your team gets recognition for being an example for the rest of the organization.

Always Lend a Hand When You Can

Your coworkers (both in your team and across teams) count on you to get the work done that you said that you would. Sometimes this means putting in a bit more effort to complete all of your tasks on time. Sometimes you’ll be a bit further ahead than you planned and get done early. There is some give-and-take while working with others, so if you finish your tasks look for opportunities to help someone else. You will find it much easier to get help later if you give it now.

Be Appropriate to the Team

There are some very large “gray” areas, and very fine lines, in team and company dynamics. It can be a minefield sometimes. You will figure them out over time. However, there are some universal truths in how you interact with your coworkers that you should follow.

Besides being illegal and against all sorts of policies, offensive jokes, comments, and general banter must be avoided at all times. You may feel like you’re joking around with someone at work, but do you really know how they’re taking it? It’s better to just stay clear of that situation entirely.

See “Profanity in the Workplace” on how to appropriately use colorful language with your peers.

There is little to be gained from negativity. It serves no real purpose for you or your team. The old adage “If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all” proves true in the workplace. You don’t want to bring down the morale of your coworkers, and making negative remarks of your boss, your company, your products, or your other coworkers is a surefire way to make other people distrust you or make them feel bad themselves (or both). There’s no use in it. Be a positive member of the team and save your complaints for when you get home.

Would You Work on a Team of “Yous”?

Perhaps the most telling way that you can tell if you’re a good teammate is to think what it would be like to work on a team where everyone is like you. Are you eager to help the team succeed, or pulling them down with negativity? Are you a pleasant person to be around, or do you find yourself being avoided like microwaved fish? What if everyone on your team acted like you did; would you enjoy seeing a team of yourself every day? It may be difficult to be objective in this kind of exercise, but honestly evaluating yourself from your teammates point-of-view is how you become a better teammate.

What Do Your Coworkers Expect of You?

Above all else, your coworkers rely on you to get shit done. Did you say you’d finish that report by Friday? It better be done by Friday. Did you commit to having a feature coded up by the end of the sprint? Maybe get off Facebook and finish up unit tests for that. This goes double for tasks that your coworkers are dependent on. Imagine someone else on your team holding up your work and all you see is them shopping on Amazon every time you walk by. Don’t be that person.

Your coworkers need to be able to trust you. See “Keep Promises and Deadlines” below for some tips on how to do that.

Your coworkers deserve respect, and you need to give it to them. Whether they just started today or have been around the company for years, treat everyone with whom you work with courtesy and a positive attitude. You’re all working towards the same goals (company vision, personal success) and nobody is personally worth more or less than their peers.

Your coworkers want to have fun with you. Any job can be stressful, and having good, positive people around you make a difference. Joke around (appropriately) with them. Be a part of their conversations. Join them for happy hours. Be a fun person to be around.

Recognize Your “Sphere of Caring”

This can be a particularly dangerous part of working on a team. First understand that it is great to have comradery with your team. You should absolutely try to make your team as successful as possible! The “Sphere of Caring” is the mental boundary around the things you connect with and care about, with all the other stuff outside. There are two common “dangerous” spheres to keep an eye out for:

“Me vs You”

This is a very natural boundary for many people. In this “sphere”, you are at the center of the universe, and everyone else is a roadblock to getting what you want. You will fight many small battles with those around you because you think you have to.

While you should definitely keep your best interests in mind during your career, seeing others’ as barriers will actually create barriers you didn’t expect. You do not need to fight against other people in your career to progress. In fact, you will often find that you need these people to help you along!
“Us vs Them”

This can be a difficult “sphere” to control. In this “sphere” you and your team are at odds with the rest of the company. Your team as a whole may feel undervalued, less respected, or less impactful than other teams. Those kinds of thoughts often turn into resentment and can be the beginning of a long-lived bitterness.

Being a strong and dedicated team is fantastic! It is always encouraged that you do your best to make, or to keep, your team working well together. Strive for the same goals as a team. Have trust in each other. However, make sure that this is not at the cost of alienating yourself from the rest of the organization. Remember that each group in the company plays an important role in moving the business forward.

Keep Promises and Deadlines

Nothing will destroy your coworkers’ trust in you as much as breaking a promise. This goes for most people in your life but it applies equally in the professional world, too. Missing deadlines is a similar issue; you made a promise that you would have work done by a particular day and you didn’t do it.

Your teammates want to be able to trust and rely on you. You want to have their trust, too. Don’t lose their trust by failing to type up that report, promising too much in too short of a time, or forgetting to refill the coffee pot when you got in this morning.

This is also incredibly important for your boss (and their boss). Do you want to know how your team gets respected and not micromanaged? By doing what you said you’d do. Not just once, but constantly and consistently. If your team shows that it knows how to do things well, on time, and on budget, you will most likely see less of your manager as they will shift their attention to other teams or projects which aren’t running as smoothly. Be the shining example in your organization of under-promise, over-deliver.

Respect Others and Bust Your Ass

[Editor – Justin Mastic] These are my two golden rules of being a good team member and employee. If I could only give you one sentence of professional advice, it would be to “respect others and bust your ass”.

From the moment you walk into the building in the morning, show respect to those around you (positivity, empathy, understanding, trust) and leave the building feeling pride in the work that you did that day. You’ll notice this theme come back a few times throughout the book. I believe it’s that important.

How to Give Feedback and Criticism

Rarely does sugar-coating a difficult conversation leave anyone feeling good about it. You will feel that you haven’t gotten your point across, and they will feel confused about why you wanted to meet in the first place. Most times it is better to be honest and to be direct. Still choose your words wisely; nobody likes to be flat-out told that there’s a problem.

One popular approach is the “compliment sandwich” where you find a couple things that you appreciate about them and provide your feedback in the middle. In that way you can start the conversation positively and end it positively.

Making Friends of Coworkers

You will be spending 40 hours per week with your coworkers in (probably) close proximity. Try to get to know them on a respectfully personal level and have fun with them. They are in the same boat as you and are looking to their teammates for support.

Be “Context” Professional

There are a few layers of culture you should be mindful of within a company. At the top you have the overall company culture. There are also layers for your department, your development team, maybe the product you work on, or even your immediate cube-neighbors. Make sure that you find the sweet-spot for working within each of those groups.

Maybe that means being more informal when talking with your immediate team members and more formal with higher-ups (that’s pretty common in the workplace). Perhaps your cube-neighbors don’t like distracting music, so use headphones while you work. Dress up to match the people you work with (don’t wear a suit at Conga). Over time you will learn the best way to work with the people around you; at the beginning err on the side of too professional/formal and loosen up as you go along.

This concept is extremely important, regardless of whether you are a manager/leader, or an individual contributor.

One of the most universal wants of people is be acknowledged and appreciated, both in and out of the workplace. Take every opportunity that you can to show genuine appreciation for the hard work of the people around you. Nobody does great work alone; when you receive praise make sure to recognize those that helped you do that great work. There are dozens of reasons to do this and zero reasons not to.

And nobody likes being blamed for something, even if it really was their fault. Especially if you are a manager or leader, do what you can to take the blame for the things that go wrong on your team. Many times, the mistake can be traced to a flaw in process instead of an individual person. Ask yourself why the mistake happened in the first place (read about the concept of “Five Whys”) and find where the mistake should have been caught. More times than not you’ll identify a missing piece or better way of doing things that will prevent the mistake from happening again.

QA is Not Your Scapegoat

Many development teams have a QA (quality assurance) person or people that are there to help make sure your code and product is rock solid. One flaw often seen in development teams is the idea that QA should be catching every bug that exists in your product. That should not be the case. QA is there to help you verify quality, not implement it.

It is your responsibility as a developer to create high-quality code. That means using proper architecture and technology for what you’re building, unit testing your code, and manual testing if necessary. Too often developers build a “happy path” solution which may take care of some of the big use cases but neglect the “sad path” since it’s usually a harder task. They then give the solution to QA for them to find out what else needs to be implemented. This is the wrong way to look at QA. Your goal as a developer is for QA to be frustrated that they can’t break your solution.

We All Have End-Users

Even if you don’t talk with the customers of your company directly, you still have an end-user. Never think that you develop in a vacuum and that the quality of your code doesn’t matter. Think about who your customers and users are for your role. Here are some examples to get you started:

API Developer: Your user may be the developer on the other end of that API that is reading your documentation and testing the endpoints you’ve built as they integrate it into their solution.

Backend Developer: You have users everywhere! Front-end developers integrate with and use your code. Customers of the product that uses your code expect the product to be reliable which has heavy reliance on your code. Other backend developers probably need to understand your code too, so they’ll be reading your documentation.

Frontend Developer: You communicate with end-users all the time… through your code! Every interaction the customer has with your product is a form of your communication with them. Every input, mouse click, the information and error messages you display, all of these are how you talk with the end-user. Give them a great story by creating a fantastic experience.

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