Happy teams

How to fix cross-team relationships

There is no doubt, that positive human connections and relationships — or more specifically empathy and trust — make for high-performance teams. It’s surprising that research was needed to tell us that we are performing better when we are ‘nice’ to each other, but there we are…
It is interesting though that even in an organisation where cultural fit, flat hierarchies and collaboration are top priorities, it is very easy in the thick of day to day work, to forget about those cultural values and head towards dysfunction.

We’ve been there.

Here is what we did about it…

(This post was co-written with David Silva Cordeiro)

Erosion of culture

For reasons irrelevant to this post, we found ourselves delivering a project with part of the team in UK and part abroad in Portugal, which shouldn’t be anything unusual. What was surprising though, was that in an organisation that is usually highly collaborative and supportive, we started to experience a gradual descend into destructive indifference, mistrust and even dislike between the two teams, enhanced by a reinforcing loop of second-guessing, groupthink and projection.

Interestingly, our retrospectives were (overly) polite, more so, everyone avoided talking about these issues, and rather deflect or divert to some other topic. If you think ‘Elephant in the room’ now you would be mistaken, neither would we acknowledge nor even recognise that the elephant was there…

Our first learning
Don’t take culture for granted. Culture needs to be constantly and proactively observed, maintained and evolved: As teams form and later new team members join, and project circumstances change, we need to adapt our culture and align behaviour.

Tribal influence

Mixing individuals with different backgrounds (culture, ethnicity, professional domain) adds value to solution design, problem-solving, ways of working and delivery in general, but it also comes with challenges: Cultures are not always compatible by default, especially not, if we are connecting tribes (groups of people with closely aligned values). In our case, we are talking a UK centric tribe close to head office and product management and DevOps background vs. a slightly younger tribe of Portuguese software engineers in a new(er) satellite office.

What could possibly go wrong?

Looking ‘under the hood’ we found misaligned expectations towards our decision-making process (the Portuguese team favoured vocal discussion and group consensus while the UK team politely deferred to specialists), a breakdown in communication due to cross-ocean separation and individuals who hadn’t built personal face to face relationships, missing trust due to a misunderstanding that clarifying and challenging a solution approach might be part of aligning on a solution rather than disagreement or lack of skill, and colleagues with ops background favoring scripting and ‘combining existing tools’ vs. software engineers were more interested in coding an application from scratch.

Ultimately we realised that these distil down

• Cultural misalignment
• Miscommunication
• Expectation mismatches

Our second learning
Tribes can be a strong positive force but we need to be aware of the baggage they come with: groupthink, cultural differences, biases, expectations. We actively need to align culture, the ways we communicate and our expectations.

Why we should care

We should care because it’s a downward spiral from here:

• First, it’s ‘just’ emotionally challenging, a not nice way of working
• Then collaboration suffers, it becomes unproductive, performance goes down the drain, so does quality
• Eventually, it leads to frustration and demotivation
• Finally, the longer this is allowed to go on, the worse it gets, and the harder it is to resolve

It is interesting to see that even within, or maybe because of, an organisation that has a collaborative, high trust culture reflected in process and personal interactions, and a great track record of successful cross-team collaboration, such behaviour can sneak in and perpetuate when the conditions are ‘right’ — or rather ‘wrong’.

In our situation, it was much easier to second guess our cross-ocean colleagues and whine to our desk-neighbours about how we were micromanaged, misunderstood and not being heard, and how the other side ‘got it all wrong’. Once we found ourselves in this downwards spiral it became much easier and less embarrassing to keep frustrations to ourselves or go on and complain to our peers than do the grown-up thing to find the courage and raise the issue.

Our third learning
Don’t let it go on. Have courage and address issues as early as possible with the whole team, even if that is the uncomfortable thing to do. It certainly is the right thing.

What we did about it

We built personal relationships
There is nothing more valuable to collaboration than personal relationships. On the most superficial layer it turns a body with ten fingers typing code into a person; on a more subtle layer, we start to understand each other and develop empathy and trust. Simply being in the same room, pairing on tasks on client site, in our offices in Portugal or in the UK for a couple of days here and there made the biggest difference.

What turned out to be especially impactful were activities not directly related to the project showing us that there was more to our colleagues than what we would see on a day to day basis, for instance, talks about work — but not project-related topics each of us would give (and of course time spend over lunch or a social outing where we found shared or not shared but exciting hobbies and interests).

We are now able to maintain and strengthen relationships via regular virtual interaction, with the occasional refresher and upgrade of face to face interaction in any location.

We adapted our decision-making process
The other big area we addressed was our decision-making process: Thought leadership based on clearly articulated project objectives and principles provided by the product owner are now providing the framework within which individual’s experiences and team-wide discussions are driving towards a solution.

We now have a good balance of timeboxing discussions, defining discussion boundaries while appreciating and recognising individual opinions and having the PO as an arbitrator to make a final call (based on goals and principles) in case of a stalemate.

We improved how we were communicating
Once everyone trusted that they would be heard and included in decision making, the need to shine and prove-oneself was removed and a now a much more organic way of decision making has emerged. We saw a shift from talking to listening from talking, the openness to understanding colleagues, a focus on ‘why’ rather than controversy by default and are now in a situation of far more relaxed collaboration where we can truly focus on value rather than teeth-clenched compromise-based deliverables.

We increased mindfulness on how we would communicate via a number of exploratory games such as Bomb Manual which perfectly highlight the need to clearly communicate as individuals and teams.

Interestingly, having done away with second-guessing and being ‘offended’ we have now far clearer and more assertive, but also far more respectful and effective communication style.

We changed our ceremonies
We adapted our retrospectives to have better feedback and learning cycles: we moved from formats like good/bad/better, racecar and sailship to safety checks. The latter brought a huge lesson to the team, allowing everyone to externalise how comfortable they were with giving, receiving and accepting feedback: We became aware of the fact that in keeping with best cultural stereotypes, the UK colleagues skirted around tough topics, and avoided giving strong feedback, while the Portuguese colleagues tended to prefer direct, straightforward opinions. We realised that one team wasn’t rude and that the ‘talking behind backs’ colleagues had in fact given feedback, just in a very subtle way. Today both sides have moved towards each other, partially adapted the way they communicate, but also understand ‘the other side’, thus allowing for open and unhindered interchange of opinions.

Our fourth learning
It is very important that we are open to understanding where each person is coming from, proactively use incentives and ceremonies to optimise communication and have feedback loops in place to monitor and optimise relationships going forwards.

Where does that leave us?

Communication flows freely, team members show respect for everyone’s opinions and are focused on doing the right thing in better ways. We found the spark that allowed our team to, finally, become truly collaborative. We also believe that confronting our internal demons, we are also now much better equipped to interact with our client who is from a very different culture altogether…

And of course we know that things will change, so we observe and adapt our perceptions and ways of behaving and working as necessary.

One more learning
Homogeneity and becoming clones is not the solution, but quite contrary, diversity paired with high degrees of understanding, openness and empathy are the keys to excellence.

David is a delivery lead at Equal Experts Lisbon and a co-organizer of the monthly Agile Connect Lisbon meetups, you can find David here and read follow his writings here.