Team Dynamics
This article was written as a submission of CS UI’s software development course’s article task.
Team dynamics is not a mystical concept in the corporate world. In fact, companies often invest a lot of time and resources into cultivating a culture that promotes teamwork. So what exactly is team dynamics?
Definition
Team Dynamics refer to how people interact with each other within a team. Everything from how they communicate with each other, to how they work together when they’re actually working. Building a good team dynamic is important; having a team with poor team dynamics will severely stunt its growth and capabilities, which can lead to underperformance.
Building Good Team Dynamics
In our team, we take certain steps and efforts to build good team dynamics.
Open Communication
Our team members respect each other, therefore we take each other’s opinions seriously and state our own opinions clearly. This can and has lead to disagreements, but the best kind; the kind that improves our product.
Empowerment
On our team, we empower each other by giving each other enough trust to make decisions on their own regarding the part they are working on. For example, we trust our front end team members to handle all of our base htmls, and in turn, my team trusts me with handling our deployment procedures.
Clear Roles and Responsibilities
In our team of 5, each and every one of us can immediately describe their role and responsibilities if you ask them to. For example, 2 of us handles most of the front-end part of our application. The other 3, including me, handles the back-end. Adding to that, each one of us has a much more defining role; for example, one of the back-end members, Irfan, is responsible for everything that has to do with our database, while another back-end member, Helmi, handles the creation of APIs. The last member of the back-end team, which is myself, handles everything that’s related to devops.
Team Slogan
Another way to improve team dynamics is by creating a slogan. In our case, we don’t actually have a slogan, but we have a philosophy behind our team’s name. Our team’s name is “Restu Ibu”, which directly translates to “Mother’s blessings”. Other than being a gag (this type of writing is akin to the type of writing usually found in bathroom stalls and the backside of trucks), we believe that a mother’s blessings will give someone comfort and strength in pursuing their endeavours. Therefore, the name is also a type of symbol, just like how skippers name their ships with adjectives in the hopes that their vessels will embody the word.
Team Capacity Building
In our team, we try to build our capacity by letting each other experiment and learn. Our team is filled with diverse people; we each have our own strengths and weaknesses. While Hanif and Naswya might not even struggle in creating a beautiful and responsive html page with animations, I struggle to put text in a container without it looking like something out of the 90s. Similarly, while Helmi has no problems in creating ajax scripts to call complex APIs that manipulate the database with its many functions and triggers, Hanif might need more time to get it working.
Similar to how going to the gym regularly might build your muscles, we do the same thing in our team. We embrace the learning part, and let our members explore things out of their comfort zone. In time, people like myself will get better at making pretty pages, and people like Hanif and Nasywa will be better at making APIs and managing docker containers, through learning by doing.
Servant Leader
Another essential aspect in building good team dynamics is servant leadership, a concept where the goal of the leader is to serve. This means that a leader should have empathy, is a good listener, is self aware, and is committed to the growth of their team.
In our group, since we officially have no leader (other than our supervisors), we incorporate those servant leader attributes to every one of us. No one takes the center stage at discussions; everybody pitches in as equals, and their opinions are treated as such. We look out for each other, offering help to those who are struggling; and in turn, those who are struggling are not afraid to ask for help. On multiple occasions, I have asked the front-end team for help when I couldn’t get something right after learning on my own, and other team members have asked me for help in debugging script and database errors. This cultivates a team that serves each other, and thus improving our team dynamics.
Conclusion
While there are still a lot that I don’t get about team dynamics, I can say for certain that learning what it is and what it does has helped our team for the better. I’m blessed to be working on my current team, where each and every one of us respects each other as equals. We criticize and disagree with each other often, but never unreasonably. Every interaction, whether it be disagreement or affirmation that our work is well done, helps each other grow to be better, both at being software engineers and at being people.