Making Good Teams Great

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Build Relationships with Your Teammates

Taking extra time to chat with your coworkers can go a long way to working well together. Empathy, kindness, and friendliness can make boring tasks a lot easier to accomplish.

Question of the Week

Starting meetings with an icebreaker can help team members get ready for sharing, boost morale, and improve communication. By learning more about each other, teams can strengthen bonds, learn about unique or hidden talents, and lead to better effective collaboration and problem solving.

Examples Questions:

What’s a hidden talent or hobby you have outside of work?
What’s an activity that makes you forget to check your phone?
What’s a topic you could give a fifteen-minute presentation on with no preparation?

Team Outings

Breaking the daily routine and a change of environment gives teams a chance to humanize each other, and develop more team bonding in a more casual atmosphere. Building better relationships and communication, showing staff that they are appreciated, and increasing overall engagement are just a few key benefits of team outings.

Learn & Play Together

When we learn together, we grow together. Give the team space to play with ideas, be imaginative, and not have to be perfect.

Lunch and Learn

Hosting lunch and learn meetings regularly provides informal and cost-effective training and networking during lunch. Creating a space for continuous learning culture improves team communication, builds leadership skills, and offers a welcome environment to share knowledge and for company updates. Having a fun and engaging break can become a great catalyst for connection, growth, and team building.

Mobbing and/or Pair Programming

Mob programming emphasizes the importance of collaboration, challenging software developers to work together in a common goal rather than work separately. Allowing team members to share and help each other on tasks, with each of their specific skill sets maximizes productivity, knowledge sharing, and engagement. By increasing instant feedback and keeping team members engaged, the overall quality of code improves while teams have a better grasp of each other’s capabilities and how their work affects each other.

For more of our thoughts on mob programming, check out our take-aways on Software Teaming by Woody Zuill and Kevin Meadows from one of our weekly Lunch & Learn sessions.

Retrospectives

How do we know what is working? Retrospectives are a key part to running a project with agile methodologies. Taking time to review what went well and was successful, and what could have gone better, including any changes the team needs to incorporate into the next sprint is a great approach to adjusting alignment to “turn up the good”, helping teams find ways to collaborate more efficiently and ultimately enjoy working together more.

I Like, I Wish, I Wonder

The “I Like, I Wish, I Wonder Retrospective” is a template for a post-sprint, or post-project review. It encourages team members to critically reflect on their past actions, results, and alignment in context of the recently completed segment of work. Asking team members to think analytically and critically helps drive welcome change and learn from past work to improve future efforts.

The template is divided into three main sections, each inviting team members to discuss prompts for reflection. The “I Like” section emphasizes positive aspects, successful outcomes, and encourages appreciation of what went well. The “I Wish” section focuses on aspects that were challenging, or could use improvement. Last, but not least, the “I Wonder” sections asks participants to be forward-thinking; sharing suggestions for future sprints or projects and/or other ways the team can become innovative.

Five Whys

The “5 Whys” technique was originally developed by Sakichi Toyoda and was used within the Toyota Motor Corporation. It is a critical component of problem-solving training, using an iterative interrogative technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem. The primary goal of this retrospective format is root cause analysis around a defect or problem by repeating the question “why?” five times, each time directing the current “why” to the answer of the previous “why”. The actual number of “why” questions may vary, however thinking more critically and with curiosity can lead teams to answers they have missed.

Build Together

Making good teams great is all about putting in the work to build better understanding within the team. Great teams often don’t happen by accident; they are finely tuned results of hours of teammates working, learning, playing, and laughing together while moving towards the same goals. Investing in boosting your team communication skills, motivating each other to grow and improve, as well as reflecting on results will have a good team quickly graduating to a great one.