The Key to Good Teamwork

This is not a card game. It's a tool for better teamwork, and it's called TeamWords. Whether it's the future of medicine, aerospace, tech, social impact, you name it, the challenges that we're trying to solve require teamwork, and the heart of that is communication. But that's harder than it sounds, because words often mean different things to different people. For example. When I say the word professional, what do you think? Well, if you're from Japan, it might mean that you wear a certain kind of suit, that you eat a certain kind of lunch. But if you're Italian, the suit changes and the lunches change. Maybe if I live in San Francisco, I'm gonna be wearing a hoodie working past 9 p.m. None of that's actually accurate, right? But if we're just using the word professional and we're plugging in where people are from, that's what we're gonna get. A bunch of stereotypes. When someone says they're professional, or creative, or passionate, or whatever, we instantly fill in our biases, our projections, our definitions. And those are just a few of the big words that we use at work all the time. Think of how many misunderstandings come from different definitions that we ascribe to words. So to help that, Mary and David created TeamWords. I used to work with David at a top design consultancy. He's brilliant. So is his wife, Mary. Together, they help big companies and universities improve team dynamics. They literally wrote a book on good teamwork. Books, actually. Teamwork is one of those things that companies often say they care about, but don't really spend the time to cultivate. Here's what happens. The CEO says, hey, we have this new team that needs to go build a product and it needs to be done really quickly. You walk into the room, there's all these new people, and your boss's boss is there saying, you have to get working on this right now. Chop, chop. In those situations, the team has all these pressures about having to get started and show progress, and the thought about talking about the team before you talk about the work kind of just goes by the wayside. When things are going well, it's really easy to say, we're really honest, we're really supportive. But as soon as things go wrong, we start to use those words as weapons. The conversation starts with, I just feel like you're being really disrespectful. Where are you gonna go with that? What can you do with that? Most problems that come up with teams are failures of vocabulary, and just looking through the deck once, people start to recognize the qualities that they wanna see in a team. Here's how to use team words. At the beginning of a project, you bring the team together and hand everyone a deck of team words cards. It's got dozens of words that describe how people like to work on teams. Pick three of them that represent what you want to see out of other people when you work with them on a team. Okay, I wanna be on a team that's approachable. Open, sure. And I wanna be on a team that's creative. And you talk about what are the behaviors, actual things that I'm willing to commit to. And then bringing that together with everybody in the team, agreeing on just three words that represent how you want to be working together. By getting specific about behaviors, everyone on the team can agree on a common definition for their team words. You take those three words, make a manifesto, put it on a wall and say, this is who we are. This is what we're gonna do. If you think about all of the time that you save arguing about things later, every minute is a gift. What's different now is teams are far more diverse. People from all over the world are on teams now. People from all sorts of different backgrounds. They all speak different languages. There are some people who have only worked at startups, who've only worked at nonprofits. We all have to work with all different types of people. I had somebody tell me that they picked the word caring because they realized that they had never been on a team where they felt like people cared about them. That's, oh, that's like feelings. And maybe if we can communicate a little better at work and we can understand each other better as people, we'll be on our way to building something even more beautiful. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, please give us a like and subscribe to Freethink for more great stories of people changing the world.