How to Overcome the Team Barrier [Part 1]
By: Tejas Kashyap
Tags: Leadership, Organizational Culture, Collaboration, Team Building, Cross Disciplinary Teams

In today’s corporate and academic landscape, there is a lot of discussion about interdisciplinary collaboration. Traditionally, teams have been multidisciplinary; every member worked in a relatively independent setting, to develop on their particular function. This has worked to some extent, but now companies have to be ready to reinvent themselves every three to four years as opposed to a decade or more in the past. Being complacent puts them at the risk of being dethroned by a startup which perceives the problem with a fresh pair of eyes.

A setup wherein people with different backgrounds collaborate by going through the user’s journey, identifying specific pain points and stakeholders in order to solve the right problem is essential. The last thing you want to do is build a product that nobody wants.

As an example, Interdisciplinary teams have been utilized to a great extent in the healthcare domain. Numerous articles discuss the pros of implementing them into your system, but, for the scope of this article, I will focus more on how to make them more efficient.

Team Dynamics

Research suggests that all high functioning interdisciplinary teams share a set of characteristics including, but not limited to, a decisive leadership, a supportive team climate, effective communication, clarity of vision, appropriate mix of skills and an understanding and respect for all diversity in backgrounds and cultures. To get more clarity on the topic, let’s delve a bit further into some of these characteristics and what forms they take in practice.

1. Varied Leadership.

Interdisciplinary teams generally possess a flatter structure as opposed to a traditional hierarchical structure. Every member of the team has collective accountability towards the end goal and most decisions are taken through consensus with a bit of guidance from mentors or other stakeholders. With that said, when individual personalities interact with each other, the dynamics of the team shifts and evolves in a certain kind of leadership environment

A) Two or more self-appointed leaders. This is a rare scenario wherein two or more individuals exhibit a greater sense of project ownership and initiative. Clashes are fairly common in this kind of setting as both the drivers frequently have different approaches to and opinions on a problem.

How to deal with it: If you are one of the drivers, take some time at every cornerstone to understand the other’s point of view, quickly discuss the pros and cons of both ideas and take the team’s consensus on what would work best. I emphasize on ‘quickly’ because this situation often leads to extended meetings and inefficiency, be mindful of the team’s time. As someone who is on this team but not driving it, do not hesitate to put forth your opinions. Having others take the lead allows for the rest to focus more on the depth and the details of a project which is a big plus.

B) One self-appointed leader. This is a typical case when only one person takes the charge on setting up the basic strategy, timelines, workflows etc. The way the team perceives this self-appointed leader depends a lot upon the personality traits and leadership style. There are times when voices of other members of the team go unheard, people feel discouraged, disoriented and start to lose faith in the team.

How to deal with it: If you believe you’re helping the team plan and execute tasks better, but, receiving a lukewarm response, it is time to reflect upon your leadership style. The easiest way to begin is by enhancing communication, let everyone put forth their perspectives and contribute. In addition to that, being upfront and asking for peer feedback on your performance will help you learn and evolve in the long term. As a member of this team who doesn’t want to take a lead, but focuses more on the details, make an extra effort to make your opinions heard. Remember, democracy over dictatorship.

C) No self-appointed leader. There are certain cases where everyone on the team prefers working on their particular function in silos but there’s no one to rattle the herd. They believe in working independently and then coming together to merge their work. This working style has some merits in reduced conflicts, saved time and an overall increase in individual productivity which is usually how companies measure performance. However, when it’s time to synthesize the final product, there’s a realization that some critical interactions between product functions were overlooked, some tasks overlapped, and everyone had a slightly different idea of what the end product would be. This is disastrous.

How to deal with it: In any kind of collaborative effort, communication is vital. Members of this type of team are all to blame for the lack of it. As most people feel more productive when working by themselves, often, teams reach a consensus of postponing a meeting or conducting it remotely. Taking initiative is the way to go here; discuss with your team that specific issues might arise in the future and express the need to meet and strategize at every milestone so that everyone moves in the same direction. When you make this happen, the combined productivity of the team far outweighs the sum of individual efforts.

2. Supportive Team.

When individuals from different backgrounds come together, they bring with them the biases associated with their field. For example, an engineer usually focuses more on utility and would want to add as many features as possible in a release, whereas someone experienced in user-centered design would realize that bombarding users with a plethora of options is usually not the best strategy. They would like to make it minimalistic and as intuitive as they can. A crucial part of building a product as a team is that everyone has trust in each other’s capabilities and respect the differences in ideology.

There are lots of team building activities that aid in this process. Moreover, as an individual, enhancing your listening skills is a good start. Being on an interdisciplinary team is all about understanding the different aspects of a product, effectively making trade-offs and managing to deliver the right product to the right market and at the right time.

‘Varied Leadership’, ‘Supportive Team’, ‘Having the Right Mix of Skills’, ‘Clarity of Vision’, and ‘Overcoming Cultural Differences and Communication Barriers’ are also pertinent to excelling in an interdisciplinary team. For the scope of this article, the first two characteristics were discussed, I’ll leave the other three for the next segment.

Closing note

I am a student of Product Development at Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovation Institute and all the thoughts and opinions expressed in this article are developed through my personal experiences.

If you found this article helpful, please feel free to like and share, make suggestions for helpful resources that I missed in the comments, and reach out to me on LinkedIn!