Teamwork and Communication

In this topic we will learn how to apply professional and ethical practices with integrity, to meet industry-wide expectations of a responsible IT professional.

We will unpack teamwork topics and issues that will apply to a typical software developer, such as team development, team culture, contributing to the team, and nurturing a positive team environment.

We will talk about what makes great communication, personal and interpersonal skills, information design, and presenting your proposal.

Staying on top in all these areas will enhance your working effectiveness and efficiency and allow for quality outcomes in all manner of organisational situations.

A team is commonly described as a group of individuals working together to achieve a common goal. Not a whole lot of individual goals, but one shared goal.

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries (n.d.) defines teamwork as “the activity of working well [effectively and efficiently] together as a team.”

Teamwork is about commitment to each other and the goal, putting others ahead of yourself, supporting and serving each other, breaking down barriers, finding common ground, lifting each other up, enabling each other, making the most of the strengths represented by the team, and filling in for each other’s weaknesses.

Watch What makes the highest performing teams in the world (Simon Sinek, 2020) and hear Simon sharing about what type of people make teams strong, high performing, and successful. It’s not what you think.

You might be thinking, ‘how can I contribute to a successful software development team?’.

Have a read of the following article which focuses on ten signs of a great software developer (Djalovic, 2019). These skills and attributes are highly sought after in the industry, as they describe an effective, efficient, and professional software developer. Working on these skills will help ensure you are an asset to any team and organisation as a software developer.

You might have your own personal code of ethics, which you may or may not have defined or written down, and your team or organisation may also have a code of ethics, but there is also a code of ethics for the software development industry. The code provides 8 principles we should all adhere to, to be the most professional and ethical software developers we can be. As such we will be able to make positive and significant contributions to any team we work with. It’s important to get to know these 8 principles and always uphold them in your development work, whether it’s for personal or for work.

Read the software development code of ethics and professional practices (IEEE Computer Society/ACM, 1999) and then complete the activity that follows.

Everyone has choices they need to make, all throughout the software development life cycle. We need to use those choices to stand up for what is right for our users, clients, teams, organisation, and for ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to do our job ethically, professionally, and with integrity, so that we can always be very proud of our work and accomplishments.

When teams start out together, things tend to be very clunky and messy for a while, as everyone finds their place and gets to know each other. It’s like a dance – the team development dance. There is lots going on, some of it visible and some not so.

Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, coined the five stages of team formation (or team development) as follows:

• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning

It’s important to understand this process that all teams go through. If you can recognise what stage your team is at, at any point in time, it might help you to understand some of the behaviour being exhibited in the team, and you will be able to help gently guide the team through the stages towards performing.

Take some time to read The five stages of team development: A case study (Abudi, 2010), and learn more about each stage and its characteristics. Read on to the example of a team moving through the five stages, and then return here to complete the activity that follows.

Team formation task

Link up the following statements with the matching stage of team development.

Everyone has been involved in a team or company that had a negative culture, and it’s never a nice experience. It makes it a real struggle to perform well and meet your goals. However, being in a team with a positive culture is so uplifting and empowering, and that makes it a pleasure to work hard towards meeting your goals.

As shown in the image above, team culture is like a picture which is made up of contributions from all the team members. Their contribution is made up of their past experiences, beliefs, perceptions, priorities, and values. All of this is woven together with the values, mission, and vision of the organisation to create a picture which is either going to be a positive one or a negative one.

The impact of a worker’s team culture can infiltrate all areas of their life and relationships. Watch out - negativity is catchy!!

Positive and negative team cultures

Positive team culture

As the image above illustrates, to have a positive team culture, members need to feel they are…

• valued – they need to feel listened to, have their ideas taken seriously, and be treated with respect.
• connected – everyone needs to feel known and like they know the others in the team, and they need to feel like they belong and fit in.
• contributing – team members need to know what their role is, and what they are responsible for, and they need to see the value in what they are doing.
• growing – each member needs to be learning, stretching, developing new skills, and improving all the time.

All members of the team can help each other to achieve these feelings. Building a positive team culture is a team effort.

Negative team culture

Ever heard of a toxic environment? That’s another way of describing a negative culture.

‘Leadership is not a position or a title, it is action and example.’ (Booker, 2013).

No matter what your position is in the team, you can lead with your actions and by your example, you can lead your team towards a more positive way of being and working – a positive team culture. Some ways you can do this is by

• upholding and demonstrating those 4 factors contributing to a positive culture that we mentioned above
• get to know your team personally, find out what their interests are
• uncover the cause and deal with it (policies, procedures, ethics, a difficult staff member)
• add to your team with people who clearly fit the culture you want your team to enjoy
• reward or at least recognise great performance, celebrate big and small wins
• recall and discuss your team values through some team activities.

Watch the following video about Noah (Ryan Gottfredson, 2018) [2:20], a hotel worker, and then answer the questions that follow about his culture experiences at work.

Positive vs negative team culture

In the video, Simon shared that Noah’s experience was because of the management, you see the behaviour of the management has created a certain culture. If Noah was feeling and behaving in that negative way at Caesar’s Palace, because of the management style, then maybe a lot of other employees were feeling the same. Others learn from the attitude of the management and the feelings spread and work can become just a means to a pay-check, not something you enjoy or thrive at.

1. How would you feel if you were in Noah’s shoes at Four Seasons?
2. How would you feel if you were in Noah’s shoes at Caesar’s Palace?
3. How could you apply what you have learned from Noah’s experience to your current or future software development team?

Feedback

Your answers to these questions will all be different, based on your personal experiences. It sounds like it would be a good idea to not be nit-picky with your teammates, but to serve them and support them and ensure they feel valued. If you work hard to ensure your teammates are happy at work, you will be happier too. Happier workers are better performers.

To ensure the best possible effectiveness, efficiency, and quality outcomes from your team, each member must be using finely honed communication skills.

What is communication?

Communication is the act of a message being given and then being received, in other words message or information sharing. It involves the sender, the medium for the message to be sent, and the receiver. If any of these three steps fail, then the message doesn’t get through or it can be misinterpreted.

The person who wants to send the message has full responsibility to ensure their message is received and understood properly.

It is often called interpersonal communication when we talk about communication between two people. Communication skills are not something you are born with, they are skills that may come more easily to some people and not to others, but in all cases, if we pay attention and practice them, we can improve, and they can make all the difference to your work relationships. Remember the case study about Shamu and Ramu, along with the other issues we already compared about them, Ramu definitely exhibited much stronger communication skills, and his business was thriving as a result.

What types of communication are there?

There are four main kinds of communication, in two categories – verbal and non-verbal.

1. Verbal - oral and written - Communication with words
2. Non-verbal - gestural and visual - Communication without words

Watch Jacob briefly explain these four types of communication (Jacob Does Stuff, 2020) [3:08] and then complete the activity that follows.

So, in summary:

Verbal communication includes

Communication forms task

Drag the communication type labels to the matching description.

Personal skills speak of a person’s own strengths and what they are good at, which can change over time as you learn and develop new skills through education or experience. Whereas interpersonal skills are the skills to do with what happens between two people, in particular communication and relationships. Inter = between, personal = people. In the case of interpersonal skills, we’re talking about the skills that enable you to communicate with and uphold strong relationships with other people.

Personal skills can be broken down into two categories.

Soft skills

• Empathy
• integrity
• humility
• critical/creative thinking
• communication
• problem solving
• cultural flexibility
• adaptability
• emotional intelligence

Hard skills

• Networking and professionalism
• debugging
• communication and negotiating
• coding
• planning and presentation
• version control
• project and time
• collaborating
• mathematical aptitude

Hard skills are skills such as being able to program in C++, these are often job-specific and are typically either learned on the job or in industry- or job-specific training. These are easy to measure and record on your CV.

This leaves soft skills. Soft skills, sometimes called people skills, are harder to measure, these are the skills which you use to interact with other people, build relationships, and they can help you in all areas of your work life, no matter what business you are in.

Interpersonal skills come under the soft skills section of personal skills, and one of the most important skills in this area is emotional intelligence (EI).

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is about recognising the emotions of yourself and those around you and using that information to inform and manage your behaviour and reactions. If you want to be a great software developer you will need to be able to communicate effectively with the people around you, including all the various stakeholders of your projects. Deepening and strengthening your emotional intelligence will give you the x-factor you need to be effective and efficient in doing that. It’s been said that EI has more of an impact on your career and day-to-day performance than your IQ.

There are 12 characteristics of emotional intelligence that come under the following four main categories:

• Self-awareness: Be aware of your own emotional reactions and behaviours, and how these affect the people around you.
• Self-management: Regulating your emotions, responses, and reactions.
• Empathy: Being aware of others’ emotions and how they are driving their behaviour and attitudes, putting yourself in their shoes, trying to understand others
• Social skills: How you relate to and communicate with other people.

Watch Emotional intelligence at work: Why IQ isn’t everything (Big Think, 2018) [4:13] to hear Daniel Goleman, creator of emotional intelligence, talking about the importance of emotional intelligence at work for software engineers.

Like Daniel said at the end of the video, the great thing is that EI is something you can learn and improve upon, unlike IQ. There are many websites which provide you with activities and exercises to help you strengthen your emotional intelligence.

For this activity, drag the labels to fill in the gaps of these sentences describing different emotions.

These emotions are some of the most common and easiest to recognise, others can be harder to spot, or can be hidden well. Pay attention to body language, things like crossed arms can give a hint as to how someone is really feeling. As you become more aware of the emotions of those around you, look for strategies on how to address and work with those emotions in a respectful and productive way. These emotional intelligence skills are vital if you want to be a successful communicator and team player.

Information design came out of the discipline of graphic design, it has to do with the written and visual forms of communication. Graphic designers realised that to communicate effectively with their users, they needed more than just to make websites and infographics look pretty, they also needed to put thought into how it would be read, processed, and understood by the user. The more people used the internet the more obvious it was that there are good websites and website that make you want to pull your hair out! Even today, there are still plenty of websites and apps that make people feel that way, they have the power to make users feel a range of emotions, even dumb, if they find they are spending too long trying to find something on the webpage or trying to figure out how it works.

It’s all about presenting complex information in a way so that anyone can understand it and so that it is intuitive to use.

In this TEDx talk, Tomoko Ichikawa, an Information Designer with 25 years’ experience shares some background, her story, and some tips about information designing (TEDx Talks, 2020) [5:42].

Tomoko mentioned one really important point a few times in her video, she said, “after all, we want to get them to the meeting, not use the machine.” This is the same in software development, and when developing websites, it pays to keep this in mind. What are we trying to achieve for the user? Now, let’s try and get them to that end-point as easily and quickly as we can, without getting in the way. The user is #1.

Have a go and putting the information design steps into the correct order.

Steps three and four should be repeated until the information design is finalised.

Let your focus stay on the “problem” and getting your users the solution they need without getting in the way.

Let’s look at some of the most important times you’ll need your information design communication skills as a software developer.

• Writing and presenting your proposal – your client may be completely non-technical and so any information you present to them, from first contact through to the project conclusion, will need to be presented in a way that can be understood by non-technical people, removing jargon and complexity.
• Designing – your page mapping and back-end architecture needs to be logical so that others in the project can understand, or people new to the project or website maintenance later can make sense of it quickly.
• Designing your UX – not just what your webpage will look like, but also does the layout and order of things on the pages make sense. Is the information displayed being interpreted correctly by the users? Are things located in intuitive places? Even… the order of fields that the tab key moves through on a form page.
• Creating infographics – could someone new to the information understand what you’re trying to communicate? Could it even be understood by someone who doesn’t speak the same language? Just like Tomoko said in the video, it can be as simple as reworking something complicated or messy into 3 clear steps.
• Writing user and maintenance manuals – this is especially important for users to be able to use the new system and learn about what else they can do with it. How many times have you bought something that you needed to read the instructions to use, and then discovered that the instructions don’t make sense, or that they are ambiguous? This experience can be so frustrating for the user, and it is completely avoidable with great information design.