• About
  • Research
    • Spatio-temporal Modeling of Groundfish
  • For Prospective Scientists
  • Mistry Consulting
  • Thoughts
    • Allyship and "Calling in"
    • Change your perspective on Fundraising
  • Team Collaborations Article Series Intro
    • Part One: Types of Objectives
    • Part Two: Key elements for great collaborations
    • Part Three: Common issues with missing key elements
    • Part Four: Supportive vs Challenging Teams
    • Part Five: Analyzing Power Dynamics
    • Part Six: Constructive feedback
    • Part Seven: Conflict resolution
    • Part Eight: Quitting
KELLY MISTRY

thoughts 
​and musings

Wide ranging topics, including science, graduate school, justice, diversity, equity and inclusion (JEDI), and nonprofit culture and structure

Team Collaboration Part Eight

10/11/2021

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Quitting: Always an option to consider

Quitting anything can be very challenging for many of us. Obviously there are issues of financial security, health insurance coverage (in the US) and future career prospects that have to be addressed if quitting a team requires quitting a job, and those practicalities are important. However, even in situations where livelihoods are not at stake, many people think of quitting as a personal failure and consequently don’t even consider it as an option unless desperate. In a team context, it can feel particularly difficult to quit because then you will feel like you are letting down the team or leaving your fellow team members in the lurch. Whatever the reasons, quitting is a very context-dependent decision that only you can make. The purpose of this article is not to persuade you that quitting is always the answer in specific situations but rather to normalize at least considering quitting. Making a good decision about your continued involvement in a team is difficult without carefully considering all of the options, and quitting is always an option that should be considered, however difficult and complicated that might be to choose

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Team Collaboration Part Seven

10/4/2021

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Conflict resolution strategies for those in non-leadership roles

Conflict is one of the hardest things to deal with in any team environment for most people, regardless of position. This is often because most of us are not taught how to handle conflict in a work environment, particularly interpersonal conflicts, and this often results in feelings of helplessness and conflict resolutions that don’t satisfy all parties or lack of conflict resolution at all. While even those in leadership positions on a team may struggle with conflict, it is usually even more difficult to resolve conflicts if you are not in a position of leadership.  
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Having clear conflict resolution processes in place is a key element of any team collaboration, but realistically this is probably the element that is missing or miscommunicated about most often. In the absence of a more robust process, typically the default process for a team member in a non-leadership position is to make your supervisor or team lead aware of a conflict, and leave it up to them to come up with a process to resolve it. This strategy sometimes works fine, but if it fails or the conflict occurring is with the team lead or supervisor themselves, there is often no obvious recourse. This article offers a few alternative strategies to consider for dealing with conflict, including how to recognize productive vs destructive conflict, uncovering common roots of conflict, and the importance of seeking allyship support.

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Team Collaborations Part Six

9/27/2021

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Giving and receiving constructive feedback
​

Giving and receiving constructive feedback is a critical skill set to develop in any work environment, but especially in team collaborations. A strong indicator of a healthy and supportive collaboration is that there is a process of some kind in place that allows any team member to give constructive feedback to any other member, whether directly or indirectly. The greatest strength of team collaborations is that many minds with different perspectives and priorities are working on the same problem, but in order to truly take advantage of that, communication and especially exchanging of constructive feedback needs to be prioritized. This article discusses strategies and considerations to keep in mind when both giving and receiving constructive feedback.

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Team Collaboration Part Five

9/20/2021

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How to analyze power dynamics in a team context, and why this is important

An important element of any teamwork environment is the power dynamics that exist in the group between individuals. In this context, power includes the real or perceived ability to make and/or influence decisions regarding the project and/or the team members’ involvement, including deciding who joins and leaves the team, as well as a less well-defined ability to influence how the team or team lead(s) perceive a team member and their work. Power dynamics within a team can often influence people and events beyond the context of the team environment, particularly if you are likely to work with these collaborators in future teams, so it is always a good idea to pay attention to them. 

​There are different sources for this power, some of which are relatively easy to identify and follow a clear structure while others can be invisible and difficult to define, but no less influential. An important characteristic of power dynamics is that they are often compounding; one individual on a team may have access to multiple sources of power, which can lead to significant imbalances and can be a fertile breeding ground for a toxic work environment. The most common power sources in any team, organized from most to least obvious, are institutional power, expert knowledge and/or seniority, access to resources and socially constructed identities.

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Team Collaboration Part Four

9/13/2021

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How to approach supportive vs challenging team environments

It is inevitable that some team environments will be better working environments than others. Challenging team environments can manifest in different ways, but a common theme is that it takes more emotional and mental energy to navigate team interactions and accomplish tasks than in supportive team environments. Consequently, the priorities and skills that you choose to focus on in any team environment can be tailored based on whether it is generally a supportive or challenging environment.

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First, you can always control how you approach working in that team, whether or not you have the power to affect or improve the team dynamics in any obvious way. If you find yourself in a supportive, healthy team, that is an excellent opportunity to practice improving your communications skills, asking clarifying questions about team processes and decision making, offering constructive feedback and ideas, and generally experimenting with how you work best in a team environment. Approach it as an opportunity to practice your teamwork and leadership (even if you aren’t in a formal position of leadership) skills, as well as whatever skills the project itself is giving you the chance to work on. Healthy teams can be excellent learning environments, and good opportunities to experiment with skill sets that you are less confident about.

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Team Collaboration Part Three

9/2/2021

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Common issues that arise when key elements are missing and what to do about it

It is always helpful to look for gaps in the key elements of team collaboration first when seeking to solve or ameliorate confusion and conflicts in teams. Below I will discuss some common issues that arise if one of the key elements is missing or incompletely implemented, along with suggestions for how to address this lack from a position as a team member but not a team lead. 

As a general rule, in a supportive team environment the first course of action for any of these would be to bring the lack of a key element up to your team lead(s) or supervisor(s) and ask them to address the lack, perhaps including offering suggestions for how to do that. However, this may be difficult or feel risky to do in some team environments, so the suggestions below are tailored towards a scenario where improving your own experience on the team is the goal, rather than improving all team members’ experiences. Part four, supportive vs. challenging teams, goes into greater depth about how to approach teams with different levels of health and support.

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Team Collaboration Part Two

8/9/2021

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The key elements that make up a great team collaboration ​

All team collaborations have similar basic elements that are required for success, whether it is just between 2 people in an informal collaboration or a team with many individuals created for a large multi-organizational project. The basic key elements of a great team collaboration are: collective knowledge of team members’ communication method preferences, collective understanding of roles and responsibilities for all team members combined with clear decision-making processes, established and collectively understood project timelines, milestones and expected products, accessible processes for conflict resolution and shared technical and/or methodological processes. 

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Team Collaboration: Part One

8/2/2021

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Types of Objectives

Working in any team collaboration requires balancing multiple objectives. There are usually constraints of some kind, time and/or money being the most common, that necessitate making choices between which objectives take precedence or receive more resources at any given time. For any individual working in a team collaboration, there are similar prioritization decisions being made, and balancing these types of objectives is critical for our healthy and productive contributions to any team collaboration. 

​The most common competing types of objectives that all of us have to balance are:
  1. Your needs as an individual,
  2. Team cohesion, and
  3. The project objectives
     


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Team Collaboration Article Series

8/2/2021

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Introduction

Team collaboration is the default operating system for humanity. If you dig into the history of any widely acclaimed historical or contemporary figure (scientist, politician, business leader, etc.) you will find in the vast majority of cases that their work and contributions could only have been produced with the support and assistance of other people, often in clearly defined teams. These team collaborations can be very diverse, including being completely informal or formalized in an institutional structure, may always consist of the same individuals or have frequently changing membership, and may operate for years or minutes. The common factors are that there are goals to be achieved, and that people are working together to achieve those goals.

The vast majority of work environments operate in team collaborations in some form or another. In some industries and organizations, these teams are very clearly defined and formally structured, with hierarchies, titled team leaders, and rigid processes that determine how individuals operate and advance in the team. Other industries and organizations have much less defined and formalized team environments, with teams assembled to achieve a single purpose, but individuals in them still work with other individuals in teams to achieve goals, whether it is called that or not. 

For this series of 8 articles, I will focus on team collaborations in the workplace, and specifically on how to navigate any team from a non-leadership position. A lot of emphasis is placed on team leaders, and consequently many resources exist to support them. However, there are many more team members without specific leadership roles than there are team leaders in the world, and their role in the team is just as vital and influential for achieving project goals. More importantly, everyone deserves to work in a healthy team environment, and everyone can contribute to and work towards making that a reality for themselves and others. 
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Over the next 8 weeks, starting today and released weekly on Monday, I will discuss: 
  1. Three types of objectives that you should work on keeping balanced when working in any team collaborations as an individual,
  2. The key elements that make up a successful team collaboration, 
  3. Some common issues that arise when some or all of these elements are missing and what you can do about it, 
  4. How to approach supportive vs challenging team environments,
  5. How to analyze power dynamics in a team context, and why this is important,
  6. Considerations when giving and receiving constructive feedback,
  7. Conflict resolution strategies from a non-leadership position, and
  8. Quitting: always an option to consider.
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  • About
  • Research
    • Spatio-temporal Modeling of Groundfish
  • For Prospective Scientists
  • Mistry Consulting
  • Thoughts
    • Allyship and "Calling in"
    • Change your perspective on Fundraising
  • Team Collaborations Article Series Intro
    • Part One: Types of Objectives
    • Part Two: Key elements for great collaborations
    • Part Three: Common issues with missing key elements
    • Part Four: Supportive vs Challenging Teams
    • Part Five: Analyzing Power Dynamics
    • Part Six: Constructive feedback
    • Part Seven: Conflict resolution
    • Part Eight: Quitting