How to Tune Teamwork?

From my student life, I used to do programming a lot. I still can remember those sleepless thrilling nights working with my favorite language C. I used to sit in front of my PC hour after hour and sometime just forgot to eat and sleep. I hated to be interrupted by anybody while I used to do programming.

I know, everyone feels the same way. Whatever we do, we just love to continue doing our work with fullest concentrations and hate to be interrupted by anything, anybody. But, somehow God is not that much kind to us and we have to work within a team. While doing work, we have to answer queries to the teammates, managers and others. We have to talk to others often. Most of the times, we can’t stick to a single task, and, have to try to concentrate on multiple types of tasks and to satisfy everybody’s expectations around us. This is not easy, but, this is life and we have no way but to work in this way.

While doing a work alone, I am the developer, tester, QA, and Manager of my work. That means, it’s me only, who has to play all different roles in the same work. That sounds hard. But, we all know, working alone is 100 times easier than working in a team where different people play different roles. Why?

While I work alone, my human brain is the single information repository and processing engine. There it’s me talking to me only. While I work, I play different roles in different phase, and, I use the single information repository and processing engine (My brain). That means, my “QA” role continuously communicates and exchanges all information with my “developer” role and vice versa. The same goes for my other roles (Manager, tester etc). So, there a great “teamwork” happens inside my brain, and, that “teaming” is tuned and each role inside this team is 100% transparent to other roles while communicating. So, as I can see, each teammate in this team gives its best and I combine their output to produce the best possible outcome by doing excellent communication.

Now, while we work in a team in the “real world”, how can we get the same tuned best possible output? That’s easy. We have to learn from the “team” inside our brain. We have to implement the same “teaming” strategy.

The key factors are the “communications, integrity of information and transparency”. Communicate as much as you can, talk a lot whenever you need. Don’t hesitate to interrupt and be interrupted. Be transparent. Be “open”, ”flexible” and “positive” while in a discussion (That’s what we are when we talk to ourselves). Respect other’s opinion in the same way you respect yours. Only then all members in your team will be able to know the same thing and work for the same goal to achieve. Only then, all members can give their bests in the team and the best possible output gets produced.

One of my favorite mentors used to explain “TEAM” as follows:

T=Together
E=We
A=Achieve
M=More