Collaboration is key for Success

Working for a company where Collaboration is part of our culture, It is important to take time to reflect upon the approaches that helped for the success of the team commitments. When I look back to see what have I done over the past year and looking for the patterns for collaboration I believe some good practices helped us to deliver a few successful iterations & solutions.

• Highlight the individual strengths
• Keep reminding the mission/goal
• Honest and open communication
• Share knowledge & insights
• Lead by Example
• Celebrate Success

Highlight the individual strengths: If everyone brings their strengths to the table while working in a team, the team be very successful. The only challenge is how to bring in those strengths or how to identify each individual strength? I had to work with a team, where it is just formed with few individuals from different teams. We all are new to each other. I got the opportunity to overlook the team at a high level and work on the rapid development of the design & development of this new product. And I had sensed everyone has a unique strength like one person is quickly understand any code base and features. The other person is very strong in debugging, the other one does very thorough code reviews, and the one is very good at refactoring and unit testing and identifying the gaps. I felt it is very important to highlight these strengths of each individual and letting them take ownership of their strengths. It helped the team to come together and collaborate effectively. Calling out individual strengths and trusting their ownership definitely helped the team success.

Keep reminding the mission/goal: I believe if the team knows their goal well it helps to reduce silos and keep everyone productive. Reminding the team everyday that we are working towards the goal of providing the patient effective care by reducing the time & burden to provider.

Honest and open communication: One of the best practices that definitely helped us was fostering honest and open communication. The more the team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas and talk about them the more productive they are going to be. As the team starts sharing their ideas, we list them on the board and try to elaborate more details on each idea we used to see a good list of pros and cons with each approach and decide on one design. Sometimes, some of us have to disagree but commit to a solution. And as a team and each team member is vocal about their commitment.

Share knowledge & insights: It is always challenging working with different and multiple teams. We practiced working on spikes for learning the legacy or new features, new tools or technologies, and documenting them. And used confluence heavily for the team documentation. This is helping us to learn the products, features, tools used within the team, and practices that team learned to make them successful. And the documentation is open and shared within and outside the teams.

Lead by Example: I highly believe on first I have to demonstrate and exhibit the collaborative behaviors for myself and that will auto-magically to passed down to the other colleagues. And I make sure I will keep up to the promises that I make to the team and individuals. I also observed one thing, the more my colleagues trust me that I have their back, the more productive they are going to be.

Celebrate Success: I think celebrating small successes with the team takes to a big hike. I think it helped us build a bond between members. And it also helped to communicate values and signals, everyone what kind of company you are in. I felt taking time out of the daily work schedule and stepping out with the team helps team building and understand each other perspectives better.