Working in a team on a project can be great fun. Or a disaster. Or something in between.

How can you achieve your project objectives by maintaining the fun part of co-working?

Allow time and room for agreeing on your team’s workflow: who takes decisions on what and who does what and how.

It’s as simple as that. Is it really? - Nope.

It all needs to happen upfront.

My experience is that this is even more important if you work in multicultural teams. The ways of thinking and working rooted in everyone’s individual, collective and cultural socialization can result in very different assumptions and behaviors. 

Here is a recent real life example: 

Peter and Pierre (names changed) are both peer project managers sitting in the same office but they have different country origins. They work hand in hand on an innovative project. They need to bring different entities (industry & academia) from different areas of expertise to the same table. Their roles are key to the success of the project. When I stepped in to help tackle some specific cultural issues, they confessed the following: it took them ONE year to set up their way of working together. It took them one year to trust each other. Building trust needs time of course. But it also requires communication. And here is the fallacy: it does not require communication about the project matters themselves, not in the first place. What is needed, first and foremost, is a step back. It needs reflection from a bird’s eye perspective. When you work in a team – be it national or international – asking each other the following questions upfront and finding a common ground usually paves the way for great teamwork:

·     How do you see the project?

·     What is your personal objective?

·     How do you define teamwork?

·     How do you work? Do you do To-Do-Lists and tick them off one after the other? Do you do the things you need to do whenever you feel it’s the right moment for them?

·     How do you communicate? Do you write e-mails or do you rather make phone calls?

·     Do you copy your/our boss in your e-mails? Do you copy me in your e-mails to keep me updated?

·     Do you like to schedule regular team meetings to keep me up to date with your part of your work? Do you only want to meet when certain issues come up?

·     How do you generally cope with things that go wrong? Do you handle them yourself or ask others for help and advice? What to do when things go wrong?

·     How do we as a team want to work out all these things? On what shall we agree?

Pierre and Peter figured all this out after working together for one year. They could probably have saved 11 months, if they had taken a step back…

The sugar cube tower game

This is all great theory and in any team session – be it training or team building – participants might nod approvingly. But it makes a huge difference if you have experienced the theory.

In the longer version of this article published by Sietar Switzerland I share a simple and ludic tool that allows for experiential learning to help any heterogenic/intercultural teams to:

1.    Develop cooperative interactions

2.    Develop communication and knowledge management

3.    Create synergies

The tool is not about demonstrating (and hereby fostering) the difficulties and differences within the team. Instead, it helps demonstrating the opportunities for synergies, starting out from a self-critical perspective.