Achieving Success in an Interdisciplinary Team
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This document discusses essential lessons for achieving success in interdisciplinary teams, emphasizing the importance of shared vision, open communication, and clear planning. The authors share their experiences from building a startup, detailing how to overcome challenges such as differing opinions and the necessity of compromise. Lastly, it highlights the value of learning from teammates and continually improving team dynamics for better outcomes.
Achieving Success in an Interdisciplinary Team
- 1. Achieving Success in an Interdisciplinary Team Leah Henrickson, William Jephcote, Rhys Comissiong
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- 5. Leah The Academic Identify your shared vision and values. Practise open communication. Make - and stick to - clear plans. Working in a team is hard. Everyone comes with their own experience, expertise, and opinions. How is anything supposed to get done? We've spent three years working together to build a start- up from scratch. Together, we identified three of the most important lessons we've learned about interdisciplinary teamwork. 1. 2. 3. However, we've all taken different things away from these lessons. That's why each of the following lessons is accompanied by our own individual elaborations. Our different perspectives make us a stronger team. Rhys The Engineer Will The Designer
- 6. Lesson 1 Identify your shared vision and values.
- 7. The Designer It's fairly common for there to be big egos and big personalities in start-up contexts. People often struggle to agree on ideas and directions, leading to breakdowns in team cohesion. When forming a team, I learnt the importance of having honest conversations to find out the underlying issues behind disagreement. It's crucial to understand each other's life ambitions and motivations before assembling a team and committing to a project. The Engineer The highest priority in meetings should be to establish team alignment. Compromises are inevitable, but there should be understanding of what the rest of the team is up to and why. With different expertise in interdisciplinary teams, some ideas may seem competing, or may be inconsistent with the product. This can lead to divided teams, making things political and slowing progress. To prevent misalignment, encourage all members of the team to share their thoughts as to what the product is as early on in the project as possible, and identify any gaps in understanding. The Academic It’s great to have so many areas of expertise represented in one team. However, everyone will come with their own ideas, expectations, and ways of working, and it can be difficult to get everyone moving in the same direction. Early on, meet with your entire team to establish exactly what you’re trying to achieve. You don’t need to agree on how to achieve that thing yet - just decide on a common goal or two. Then, set some ground rules (e.g. meetings no longer than an hour, who leads certain tasks). Review these goals and rules periodically. Lesson 1: Identify your shared vision and values.
- 9. The Academic It can be awkward and uncomfortable to share your ideas with other people. There will probably be at least some miscommunication and disagreement, especially if those people come from very different backgrounds than you. But your ideas are valuable and worth sharing. Just don’t expect your ideas to be the right ones all the time. Be open to criticism and debate, and really try to listen to your teammates - they have valuable ideas too. Ask questions when you don’t understand. These conversations may slow things down a bit, but your team and product will be stronger for them. The Designer When experts from different subject areas get together, discipline- specific terms that no one else actually understands can get thrown around, leading to confusion. Foster a culture that strives for a shared understanding by using non-expert language. Something that I've found helps with this is being personally close to teammates. You can speak honestly, being both open to criticism and unafraid to criticise others’ ideas. Everyone can trust that the criticism is not targeted personally, but only at ideas. The Engineer Conversations can be a very inefficient way of communicating. Although your teammates may say a lot, interpretations of what's being said can be vastly different. Try collaboratively creating diagrams, graphics, and documentation so that gaps in understanding can be identified and corrected. Promote a safe environment where team members are not personally criticised for their ideas. If collaborators don’t feel safe to share ideas, do not expect any innovation to occur. Lesson 2: Practise open communication.
- 10. Lesson 3 Make - and stick to - clear plans.
- 11. The Academic If you don’t make it clear precisely what people need to do, and by when, things won’t get done. While it’s important to be flexible in your schedule (life happens!), setting both short- and long-term goals with your team will give you clear milestones to work towards. Ensure that all goals have suggested dates for completion. In your meetings, review your progress in working towards achieving these goals, and set clear actions for everyone at the end of each meeting. Have everyone review their actions aloud before everyone heads out, so the whole team is on the same page. The Designer Making sure meetings run smoothly and on time is very difficult to do, but try your best. As always, practice makes perfect! Some helpful things to try are: setting an agenda in advance, moving on if a conversation seems like it’s not going anywhere (making a note to come back to that point later), and always setting and assigning actions to build accountability. To move forward with the problem that you're tackling, make sure that aims and long-term goals are well-defined and understood. The Engineer All projects include uncertainty. It's great to plan, but in the early parts of a project there are still many unknowns. Something is likely to cause an issue and force you to change direction. I suggest working in a three-month cycle, setting achievable and action- oriented goals that demonstrate clear progress to the team. You will need this for motivation. Get feedback from users quickly and you'll figure out which direction to go in. Your final aim must be based on the problem you are solving. Lesson 3: Make - and stick to - clear plans.
- 12. Finally... Here are some other things we've learned.
- 13. The Academic Sometimes working in an interdisciplinary team can be great, and sometimes it can suck. I love opportunities to learn from others about things I didn’t even know I didn’t know. However, I also love getting things done quickly and efficiently, and that can be hard to do when you can’t seem to find common ground. Just accept that you’ll often need to compromise, or even throw your own ideas out the window. And, quite frankly, there will be times when others’ ideas will actually be better choices. Really listen to - and learn from - your teammates. The Designer Over the duration of this project, my perceptions of good design work have changed. I've realised that serving as a ‘Design Facilitator’ to include my team in the design process has worked so much better than my just being the ‘Design Expert’. I've learned that involving the team early on builds a collective sense of ownership in a project. Also, don’t be afraid to try new things! These things won’t always go perfectly, but aim for continuous improvement by having retrospective group chats. In these conversations, go through what you should start, stop, and continue doing. The Engineer One of the most common causes of project failure is poor communication. The current consensus is that interdisciplinary teams improve the quality of products developed, but what's less discussed is how interdisciplinarity can lead to inefficiency in communication. If you want the benefits of an interdisciplinary team, I encourage you to critically assess your own ability to work within a team, and to identify skills to improve: for example, self-awareness to recognise when you need to learn more about a topic for effective dialogue with teammates from different disciplines. Other things we've learned.
- 16. Henrickson, Jephcote, Comissiong (2022)