Ode to My Favorite Team Member

Teams work well by the quality of their members. Team work is a the extra work we must do to make the team more than the sum of if its members. In this hopefully short article I will name some of the things that are often overlooked but can immensely help team overall health and performance.

Know When and How to Leave

Quiet quitting is one of the most toxic things you can do to a team. But sometimes you just feel you're not contributing for some reason, and you can't bring yourself to fix it. A very mature thing I've seen some people do in various teams is to explicitly quit the team and organize their departure proactively. This gives the team the explicit trigger to react to an already existing problem, and if you do it well, saves you a lot of negative emotions as a good leaver. Good leavers announce when they will leave well on time, don't use it as leverage, and make sure they transfer all knowledge they can before they go. A good leaver can really bring the team to a new level. I have some particularly good leavers in my hall of fame, but I don't want to mention them explicitly because leaving invariably brings out some difficult emotions to process as well. This serves as an illustration to how hard it is to get this one right. It's not my best skill to be honest.

Act Instead of React

Reactions are more instinctive than actions. The easiest way to get by in especially larger organizations is to react quickly when someone points at you, but avoid the lime lights as much as you can otherwise. Just let the money trickle, keep your head down. Actions are what sets the pace, defines the direction, implements the intention. It's really awesome to be around someone who acts, because it directs our reactions and invites us to act decisively as well. Even if an act is not helpful, it allows others to give feedback (react) and set the right direction. Make sure that if you react with corrective feedback, you pair that with an action of your own to keep your team mates motivated and show that you're not afraid to bear your share of the burden of corrective feedback if it's needed.

Prioritize Productivity of Team Members Over Your Own

I've been in teams where the star player was doing more than half the work of the whole team, and the others were deferring to them for all hard problems. Apart from very specific situations like a surgery for example, it is detrimental to team health to have a large inequality in a team. I would speculate that even surgical teams are typically not very healthy and the ego of some surgeons is far too big, but in that situation we need to optimize everything around the effectiveness of one set of hands for a very good reason. In most other teams, the multitude of brains and hands collaborating well is way more important than one particular pair doing well. Members joining a team with a superstar will quickly become demotivated and underperform reactively until they leave. Don't fall into that trap.

Instead we can spend most of our time learning and teaching, and try to show a good example maybe 30% of the time before we go back to harvest feedback and teach our best tricks to our team members.

Maintain the Team

Some great team members I know spend multiple hours per day just talking to others and improving relations. This may seem like a time waster to the short sighted, but if you pay careful attention, you will find that these members are the ones that always know who to call, and when they call the others pick up. When big challenges arise, we need to have trust and rapport to organize around them quickly. What better time to build those relations than when things are going relatively smoothly?

I love to hear about interesting team puzzles. Let me know if you have other things you value in teams!

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