What to consider when picking teammates

What role do you play in a team? What do you look for when you join a team? What are things that make a team successful?

I got these questions several times in interview process and they led me to write these post.

Last year when I joined the Master of Analytics, I was fortunate enough to start working with 3 other amazing gals. An Actuarial Science girl, a Statistician, and a Financial gal. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that a marketing girl, as I am, would match with these profiles. Honestly, I never believe we could work well together. The reality is: YES, damn yes! Why?

1.                Standards

Every time we met for a project, we were ambitious about the ideas and outcomes to achieve. We always pick challenging projects which we knew we could learn a lot. We were all engaged at the same level to do our best.

2.                Diversity

We come from different backgrounds and that became our strength. Our diversity makes us stronger because none of us is better than the other. We are just extremely good at different things, instead.

I. I am the best communicator in the group. I love translating problems to the business partners and I really enjoy finding creative ways to pass the information along; I am extremely organized, and I always set the workflow.

II. Carrie has a gift with numbers, and she is an incredibly hard-working girl. Her way of digging into problems and questioning has allowed us to avoid many inconsistencies and bring real top-level work to the table.

III. Hannah is a math girl. She can crack code and mathematical formulas faster than anyone else. Plus, she can explain complicated formulas and complicated English words to anyone in the room.

IV. Yuling is the dream team member. She is the best coder in the team, and she has a passion to solve problems like I have never seen. More than anything, she has the capacity to share knowledge in the humblest way possible. I have learned a lot from her.

3.           Communication

This seems easy but I am surprised how often people argue with their teammates. In this team, we have never had an argument. We have had discussions, different points but we also get to a consensus. We don’t share things about our work with third parties and every time there is a problem: we talk about it. We don’t mention it to somebody else instead! That’s the real secret.

4.           Flexibility

You might seem surprised by my last skill, but I really think it is crucial to be flexible. Having the capacity to adapt to each other has helped us enormously to do well. Why? Because we have very different schedules and ways of working. For example, Hannah likes to work under pressure; Yuling likes to work at night (from 10pm to 4am she is usually super productive); I am a morning person; and Carrie has a baby, so she needs to adapt to his schedule all the time. If we were not able to be flexible with each other, working together would be a nightmare.

Why did I pick these skills? Why didn’t I pick any technical skills?

As we are getting training to be data scientist you might be surprise there are no technical skills in the backbone of the success of my teamwork. Why? Because I honestly think technical skills are secondary. We can easily learn how to code but we can’t learn how to be a good teammate in a month.

Even if you have a very good coder in your team, if he or she is not able to communicate his/her work and share his/her knowledge is useless.

The point of teamwork is to learn from each other and elevate each other. When the focus gets into selfishness and wanting to do more than anyone else or often less than anyone (the famous free riders), the teamwork is gone, and the success of the work is usually set to failure.

I hope this was useful and you think twice next time you need to pick a teammate.

Daniela

Photos by Christopher Gower & Kevin Ku on Unsplash