Archinect - News

When team-building isn't working, try this

2019-07-25T15:50:00-04:00

When we build better teams, we tend to have better work. But sometimes the traditional team-building approach can leave people feeling more separated from one another. University of Sydney Researchers, Julien Pollack and Petr Matous, say that this is because we tend "to gravitate towards those we know." It's great to strengthen already strong relationships, but, if we want to increase trust and familiarity, two things present in successful teams, we must create what Pollack and Matous call "psychological safety."

"Research suggests psychological safety is crucial in the work environment. There is much more to team success than simply focusing on the task at hand. Team members need to talk regularly, and be comfortable raising difficult issues," they write. To achieve this comfort the pair has adopted a spin on the 36 questions that lead to love.

Essentially, the idea is to pair up people across a given group and allow them to do this exercise that involves a conversation lasting ju...

Cognitive scientist debunks the problem behind ineffective collaboration

2019-07-25T13:09:00-04:00

Collaboration is essential to our work in architecture, but, as the saying goes, a team of experts does not make an expert team. Cognitive scientist, Stephen M. Fiore believes he has an answer to better collaboration. He suggests to start in our schools, where students work in groups but are not "explicitly instructed" about teamwork. Based on his research, he provides three recommendations:

First, is to introduce teaching on teamwork into the classroom as early as possible. "Research has demonstrated it’s possible to teach collaboration competencies such as dealing with conflict and communicating to learn," Fiore writes.
Second, it's important to give students the opportunity to practice working in teams. This is already quite prevalent in schools but Fiore believes students should focus on working across different disciplines.
Third, instruction and practice needs to be followed up by regular feedback. "Instructors should assess students on teamwork processes like relationship manag...

When "Friendly" Competition Becomes Backstabbing Survival

2019-07-24T14:57:00-04:00

An organization that relies upon individual goals or performance benchmarks to evaluate employees...needs to be careful to design competitions and structure comparisons that thwart the efforts of some workers to sabotage their colleagues. Otherwise, saboteurs may bring down everyone’s numbers — including their own.

Associate professor, Szu-chi Huang at the Stanford Graduate School of Business has been studying how competitions within the workplace materialize among larger teams. She explains that competition inside companies "is something that needs to be carefully structured and managed." And that while they do increase engagement, destructive effects can be had as well.

Colleagues can grow preoccupied with proving that they are better than one another, especially, when competition is encouraged inside a professional work environment. According to Huang, this distracts from the larger goals of the group.

One proposed solution for better in-house contests is for companies to try to "restructure the comparison by matching employees who are at different phases of their careers instead of the same phase, for instance through a mentorship system...Or they could highlight the differences and uniqueness in each employee’s background, task, and project, and thus make the comparison less meaningful....