Working in teams is my favourite way to work towards an objective or to solve a problem! If I’m completely honest, teamwork is the only aspect of design thinking that comes completely natural to me. And that may very well be because I’ve practiced it so often at school and at my workplace.
Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” I’ve never really thought about the definition of a team but this seems like it hits the nail on the head. I think the key word in the first part of the sentence is that a team is not only a small number of people with skills, but with complementary skills – this is important because we often form groups based on whether we know we can get along with the other person(s) and also what skills they have in order to complete the project at hand. I’d also like to comment that being mutually accountable is very important for the dynamic of a team to function well. In order for a team to work successfully together, I find that when everyone feels responsible for the work they are assigned, when everyone contributes equally, and when everyone feels guilt when they think they are letting their team down – this is really what being mutually responsible is all about. When a team member isn’t responsible for their actions within the team, i.e. skipping meetings, not providing work on time to the rest of the group, etc. this is what affects the group and the functionality of the team may be compromised.
I think teamwork is the best way to foster collaborative work. Katzenbach and Smith say that “the best working groups come together to s hare information, perspectives, and insights; to make decisions that help each person do his or her job better.” I find this extremely true – at my workplace at HSBC Bank Canada, I intern in the Marketing department and have experienced how working groups function. Although I feel that the collaboration of working groups slows down the decision making process, it takes much longer because there are multiple stakeholders involved, the decision itself is one that is more thought through, has more perspective and insight, covers many more aspects than if only one team produced the decision. For example, I was working on a project to draft communications to attain personal information from clients. To draft that message, we include various stakeholders such as the Marketing team, Product team, Customer Journey team, Legal, and Compliance teams to ensure that the absolute best, concise, accurate, and presentation to the client is as easy and best as possible. This process definitely slows us down in getting the message out to market because it has to pass through so many different layers of approval; however, we spread the decision making across different bank functions so that the bank can be the one said to be responsible for the decision. Collaboration in this sense is not only recommended but required.
In the Tom Kelly article, “The Ten Faces of Innovation,” I don’t quite agree with his stance on the Devil’s Advocate. I think he places the Devil’s Advocate in such a negative sense when really, the Devil’s Advocate plays a very important role in the decision making process, so long as he criticizes fairly and in moderation. I don’t think that the Devil’s Advocate is the person who ruins innovation; they play a very important role because they push the innovator to think through their ideas more fully before actually implementing them. It would be bad if the Devil’s Advocate never saw the good side to ideas but so far as they push the innovator to think through the possible problems of the idea, I think he is just doing his job. This is just the person wearing the black hat on the team but it is necessary sometimes!