Building Teams Through Communicatin

This resource first appeared in issue #26 on 29 May 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Working With A Research Community: Communications Tools

The New Science of Building Great Teams - Alex “Sandy” Pentland, HBR
“Bursty” Communication Can Help Remote Teams Thrive

• Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley, Behavioural Scientist

These two articles circulated independently this week, expressing related ideas about how communication works in high performing teams.

The first emphasizes how communication works between team members. It’s worth reading, but two key points:

• Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
• Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader.

The first is also mentioned by Google among many others. Preconditions for that rough equality of contribution are that it’s safe to speak up without having someone jump down your throat and that no one person dominates conversation.

The second is just as important. We don’t want to be bottlenecks for our team! One-on-ones are great ways to spur teammate-to-manager conversation. Stand-ups and staff meetings are great forums for encouraging team members to talk and work together without our intervention.

The second emphasizes another point:

• Peer communication is bursty, rather than constant

Bursty is a feature, not a bug, here. Alternating flurries of peer discussion and relative quiet as each works diligently away in silence is a good and healthy sign. It’s a signal that communication is achieving a vital goal - helping the peers get meaningful work done.