The idea of teamwork and the ability to work collaboratively with others is taught from a young age, whether on a ball field or in the classroom. Even as we get older and learn to hone new skills to excel in a profession, those same simple teamwork skills still apply.
Your ability to work collaboratively with others and also foster a collaborative environment in the workplace will help you make a smooth transition from engineer to manager.
When working with a team, it often helps to think of it as a small company. You will have to work together to deliver the result to the customer. When your team has a clear agenda and solidly defined roles, things can be pretty easy. But more often than not, goals become fuzzy and roles are not clearly defined, resulting in frustration among the team members and customer dissatisfaction.
Here are five easy ways to turn your next project working with a team into a collaborative dream:
1. Know your goal.
Often teams are eager to make progress together without clearly identifying their goal. Your first step as a team should be to get clarity on what your end goal is. This can sound redundant, but more often than not while teams are busy working hard – they are working hard on the wrong goal and serving the wrong customers.
Taking action at this step can ensure that you meet your goals and reduce the need for consultants to be brought in to fix problems caused by lack of clarity and communication later.
These are some simple steps and questions to ask to help you clarify and reach your end goal:
Action: Set a team meeting, write the purpose of your team and discuss the views of the goals of the project.
Question: What does your final outcome look like?
Action: Define who your customer is.
Question: Who has to be happy with the final result?
Action: Communication with the customer is critical at this step.
Question: Who is going to check with the customer to get clarity on expectations and how success will be measured?
Action: Meet regularly and report back on the goal.
Question: What steps are being taken to meet the goal? Was the end goal met?
2. Develop a structure.
This is best done during the second meeting to ensure you now have the right members needed to accomplish the goals that were set in the first team gathering. For the structure you want to decide:
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Leadership
Who is going to lead the team and take responsibility for the result? Often the leader is someone with the best relationship with customers, but they must be willing to lead, take charge and steer the group clear of any chaos.
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The plan
Break down the project into major steps and assign your team members their roles and action items they are responsible for. If an action item is not assigned or claimed, it likely will not happen.
3. Develop a communication plan.
How is your team going to work together to communicate actions and see results? Project tools such as Asana are often used for this, while other teams just use a basic whiteboard. Whatever your communication method is, everyone has to be on the same system.
4. Deal with conflicts swiftly.
And yes, there will be conflicts. The project leader or the leader of a sub-task in the project needs to act swiftly and decisively when conflicts arise. Common conflicts you may experience are:
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Personality conflicts
Not everyone on your team will be the same, but you will have to find a way to work together. This does not mean your group has to become friends - just get to the end of the project, see results and meet a goal.
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Disagreements in scope or results
Some team members will want perfection, others will just want to be done and a few will want to make entire changes in the company policy. This is when the team leader will have to pull the team back on track to stay focused on the goal.
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Team members not delivering
There will always be someone with poor performance who will not show up and won’t be able to deliver the goods. This instance will require the team to work around issues and make a way to reach the end goal anyway. However, if a team member continually disrupts progress, he or she may need to be removed from the team to ensure productivity.
5. Constantly get feedback from the customer(s)
Keep your customer in the loop and always ask a lot of questions. You may wish to assign someone to stay in contact with the customer or periodically invite the customer into your meetings. Do not make decisions off what you think the customer would like, but rather get their feedback on the decisions you are making for them. Also, never assume that the customer will not change their mind during the process.
During an IEM class project the team failed to talk to me regularly, so midway on the project I called the leader to ask how it was going. He explained to me that they felt they were doing what I wanted. They felt they were on track. I had to let him know that it didn’t matter how they felt, but rather how as the customer, I cared more about how I felt. Assumptions, even with the best intentions, are a bad idea.
A Curriculum Based on Collaboration
Team projects are one of the largest challenges engineering managers can face. They need teams to get work done, but teams involve people – and people can generate chaos. Sometimes even leaders themselves contribute to the chaos with poor directions. While you need not follow them exactly, incorporating each of the five above steps will help your team see greater collaboration and experience even greater results with your customer.
A main part of the IEM curriculum includes assigning projects that are purposefully fuzzy, with little structure. We then let things go as they will and see how the groups react. While some hold things together well, we usually see a combination of struggle, conflicts, emotional challenges and sometimes hurt feelings.
However, when all is said and done and the big result is delivered, all our classes have commented how the experience was a great opportunity to learn to work together and get to know each other better.
Let’s Work Together. Learn More Today.
A key to becoming a leader is being able to work well within a team – something that our students are learning every day. We would love to talk to you about the next steps of your career and how we can help you accomplish your goals. Use the form on this page to schedule a time to talk or email us at
About IEM
The Master of Engineering with a concentration in Information Engineering Management (IEM) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a specialized concentration designed primarily for engineers and people in technical positions. The concentration presents business systems and soft skills in a curriculum that is based on actual engineering industry needs and is offered completely online.