Teamwork and Collaborative Writing

Building a Team

In the 1960s, psychologist Bruce Tuckman described four stages of team building: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. While there has been a lot of research since then on team formation, Tuckman's stages are still often considered the benchmark for team building. You can find any number of articles, books, and videos that elaborate on Tuckman's research. For a quick overview, have a look at this Mind Tools article and brief video: "Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing: Understanding the Stages of Team Formation,"  before you read the rest of this chapter.

If you can choose your partners for a collaborative project, it is tempting to choose friends and/or people with similar backgrounds as yourself. If the project is deeply discipline-specific, this may be a good idea. Working with friends and close colleagues can help ease the awkward early stages of a project. However, projects that require teams often include aspects from multiple fields and disciplines.

When you begin picking team members for a writing project in a technical writing course, you should consider choosing people with different backgrounds and interests. Just as a diverse, well-rounded background for an individual writer is an advantage, a group of diverse individuals makes for a well-rounded writing team. As a side note, it is never a good idea to work in a team with a romantic partner. It can be annoying and awkward for the rest of the team to watch as you and your partner canoodle or bicker. And modern romance such as it is, nothing can damage a team quicker than a romantic break-up in the middle of a project.

At the same time, collaborators can become obstacles, requiring constant supervision. In group situations, other students can fail to attend classes or out-of-class meetings; they can ignore your efforts and just focus on their own missions or visions about ways documents should be written. When collaborators do not do their job, they can become an annoyance–just another obstacle rather than a support and an inspiration to colleagues.

The whole truly can be larger than the sum of its parts. Through collaboration, we can produce documents that we alone could not imagine. Collaborators can inspire us, keep us on task, and help us overcome blind spots.

Due to the many potential problems with teamwork, it is crucial at the beginning of any team project to do the following:

• Articulate and clarify team members' qualifications
• Define roles for each member
• Establish responsibilities of each team member

Qualifications

As a first step, you want to identify any strengths and weaknesses. There are at least two ways to think about qualifications: 1. knowledge, skills, and abilities, and 2. personality types.

The first aspect – knowledge, skills, and abilities – is pretty straightforward. The engineer in your group should work on the engineering aspect, the accountant should work on the financials, the lawyer should work on the legal matters, and you want the marketer to work on PR. When writing proposals for external clients (and sometimes even internal proposals), you may be asked to include the résumés of each of the team members. This is to help demonstrate the group's strengths through its expertise and diversity.

The second aspect of qualifications is perhaps a little fuzzier and has to do with interpersonal relations. A recent study by Google found that "psychological safety" – that "team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of others" – is the most important characteristic of effective teams. One can only feel safe in a group if they are comfortable with the other team members' personalities.

Articulating personality skill sets can help divide the work most effectively and help avoid unnecessary conflict and confrontation. For example, if someone in the group is very social and outgoing, they might be the best person to stop people on campus to ask them survey questions. If someone in the group is a careful listener, they should probably be one of the people who talk to clients or experts. If one of the team members is more studious or internet savvy, perhaps they should complete more secondary research. The Meyers-Briggs test activity at the end of this chapter may be a good method to begin to understand personality types and how to best harness their strengths.

Roles

Once the group has completed an honest assessment of its strengths and weaknesses, you can move on to determine the roles of each member. Roles are slightly different from responsibilities. Roles describe each individual's general purpose and duty on a team. It designates their main areas of concern. On the other hand, responsibilities refer to the specific tasks each member will complete.

To use a sports analogy – the position you play on a team is your role, but the specific responsibilities during a game will often shift, sometime from play to play or even within a play. In football, a wide receiver's responsibilities vary greatly – on one play, it is to get open for a reception; on another, it may be to cross up the defense to allow another receiver to get open. A wide receiver could be called on to block a defensive player or, in rare circumstances, even pass the football. Sometimes a wide receiver must instantly switch their responsibility from offense to defense and tackle an opponent who just intercepted a pass. But the role of a wide receiver is never likely to be confused with the roles of a center who snaps the ball or a linebacker who is always looking to tackle the person with the ball.

Every project is slightly different and demands different roles, but some common roles include:

• Leader/Coordinator/Project Manager: This person is not the boss but the person who ensures that everything runs smoothly. They do not give orders or make demands, but rather they serve to keep the group operating at its best and sticking to schedules.
  
  
• Monitor: This member keeps track of decisions and their outcomes and keeps an eye out for any potential flaws or conflicts.
  
  
• Recorder/Note Taker/Secretary: This person is responsible for keeping the records of the group. They should be able to tell everyone what was agreed and when. They keep the notes (or minutes) of the meetings.
  
  
• Shaper: This team member often has the big ideas, the drive to see them through, and the assertiveness to steer the group.
  
  
• Investigator/Researcher: Whether it is through secondary or primary research, this person likes to look for answers to the questions driving the project. In a big project, everyone will likely contribute some research, but this person would be the one who dives into the topics the most.
  
  
• Specialist: Often referred to as subject-matter experts (SMEs), this is a person with deep background on a topic. Often groups will have specialists in more than one area.
  
  
• Editor: The best writer will often write the least amount of original content in a large project – rather, their role will be to edit and improve upon everyone else's writing. They also help create one voice in documents written by multiple people with multiple writing styles.
  
  
• Designer: The designer is the person who makes sure any documents, presentations, videos, or websites created by the team look appealing and professional. As the name implies, they are in charge of graphics and design.

Responsibilities and Planning

Once you have articulated the qualifications of each member and established the roles, it is time to assign responsibilities and plan the project. This includes dividing the work, creating a schedule, and anticipating problems (obstacles and conflicts). You should also agree on the main avenue of communication and create an online document and/or folder that will be shared by all group members.

Capture your team's roles, responsibilities, and decisions in a simple team-plan document. It can contain the key dates in the team schedule, a tentative outline of the document to be team-produced, formatting agreements, individual writer assignments, word-choice preferences, and so on. The planning stages will often include all or most of the following actions:

• Analyze the writing assignment.
• Pick a topic.
• Define the rhetorical situation.
• Brainstorm and narrow the topic.
• Create an outline.
• Plan the research (primary and secondary).
• Plan a system for taking notes from sources.
• Plan any graphics you would like to see in your writing project.
• Agree on style and format questions.
• Develop a work schedule for the project and divide the responsibilities.
• Develop a system for resolving disputes.

Much of the work in a team-writing project must be done by individual team members on their own. When dividing the work, aim for these minimum guidelines:

• Have each team member responsible for writing an equal amount of the assignment.
• Have each team member responsible for locating, reading, and taking notes on an equal amount of sources.

Some of the work for the project that could be done as a team you may want to do first independently. For example, brainstorming, narrowing, and especially outlining should be completed by each team member on their own; then, get together and compare notes. Keep in mind how group dynamics can unknowingly suppress certain ideas and how less assertive team members might be reluctant to contribute their valuable ideas in the group context. If you notice this happening, be proactive and ask for everyone's thoughts or opinions – especially those group members who may be hesitant to talk over others – so that good ideas do not remain unheard.

After you divide the work for the project, write a formal chart or calendar and distribute it to all the members.

Scheduling

Early in your writing project, set up a schedule of key dates and deadlines. This schedule will enable you and your team members to make steady, organized progress and complete the project on time. It is a good idea to figure out a day and time during the week when all group members are free and can meet in person or online. Block off that hour every week. Before you meet, write out an agenda that includes all the main topics of discussion, including old business, ongoing business, and new business. The agenda should include a time schedule for the meeting to make sure everything is covered in the time allotted for the meeting. If you find one week that there is no real reason to meet, you can cancel it.

As shown in the example schedule below (Figure 1), your project schedule should include not only completion dates for key phases of the project but also meeting dates and the subject and purpose of those meetings. Notice these details about that schedule:

• Several meetings are scheduled in which members discuss the information they are finding or are not finding. One team member may have information another member is looking everywhere for.
  
  
• Several meetings are scheduled to review the project details, specifically the topic, audience, purpose, situation, and outline. As you learn more about the topic and become more settled in the project, your team may want to change some of these details or make them more specific.
  
  
• Several rough drafts are scheduled. Team members peer-review each other's drafts of individual sections at least twice, the second time to see if the recommended changes have worked. Once the complete draft is put together, it too is reviewed twice.
  
  

Figure 1: A project schedule in the form of a simple table.

Anticipating Problems and Conflicts

Think about how to resolve typical problems that can arise in a team project and document your team's agreements about these matters in a by-laws document:

• Workload imbalance. When you work as a team, there is always the chance that one of the team members, for whatever reason, may have more or less than a fair share of the workload. Therefore, it is important to find a way to keep track of what each team member is doing. Periodic group evaluations and self-assessments, including logging hours spent on the project, can help accomplish a good balance of work.

• Team members without relevant skills. Sometimes a member may claim to have no relevant skills. That could just be an indication of that person's anxiety or lack of interest in engaging in a group project. Each team member in a writing course should contribute a fair share of the writing for a project. However, there are plenty of tasks that do not require technical knowledge, formatting skills, or a sharp editorial eye, for example: typing and distributing the team plan, the by-laws, and the minutes of team meetings; or reminding team members of due dates and scheduled meetings. In fact, except for the anxiety or lack of interest, the self-professed unskilled team member might make the best team leader!
  
  
• Disappearing team members. If your team is unfortunate enough to have an irresponsible member who simply vanishes, have a plan for what to do about that, and document it in your team by-laws. One obvious solution is to kick the team member off the team and inform the instructor (if it is a writing course) or the next level of management (if it is a nonacademic organization). Of course, you want to try to avoid losing a team member, so constant communication is a key ingredient to well-functioning groups. The sample email below (Figure 2) demonstrates that the team leader did all they could to get the disappearing member back in the fold, and is about to give them up as lost.

Figure 2: A sample email sent to a disappeared team member.

• Seemingly entrenched team-member disagreements. It is amazing how vehemently team members can disagree on aspects of a team-writing project. Have a plan, written in your team by-laws, on how to resolve these matters. Should they be put to a vote? Flip a coin? Should you "escalate" the matter to a neutral or higher-level party? Do you have a group mediator who can be impartial and make judgment calls?
  
  
• Radically inconsistent writing styles and format. Because the individual sections will be written by different writers who are apt to have different writing styles, set up a style guide in which your team members list their agreements on how things are to be handled in the paper as a whole. These agreements can range from the high level, such as whether to have a background section, all the way down to picky details, such as when to use italics or bold and whether the phrase your group wants to use is "click" or "click on."

Before you and your team members write the first rough drafts, you cannot expect to anticipate every possible difference in style and format. Therefore, plan to update this style sheet when you review the rough drafts of the individual sections and, especially, when reviewing the complete draft.

One of the best ways to smooth out the different writing styles is to have everyone consistently work on the entire document together. That is, read all the sections and make comments and edits throughout the writing process. Then, at the very end, have one person edit the entire document for consistency and design.

Communication

Good communication is the key to successful team projects. You should decide early on how you will communicate (group text, email, an app, etc) and how you will share documents.

Once the team is formed and work begins, it is imperative that any issues that arise are addressed early. Most group conflicts start as miscommunication and/or misunderstanding. Everyone in the group should always be a part of any information that is sent between members. Include all members in all communication, even if it does not seem all that important. That is what the cc line is for in emails.

Team projects are generally evaluated on their own merits, regardless of group dynamics and participation. In other words, you cannot tell a client that one of your team members was slacking, and that is why the graphics and design do not look so nice. In a professional setting, who did how much work does not matter to the client – they only care about what the team delivers.

Although some members in the group may fulfill different roles and do more or less writing, in a project for a writing class, each member of a group should contribute actual writing and research to the project.

Group work needs to be a collaborative effort. If someone in the group is not pulling their weight, it needs to be addressed right away. Sometimes it is due to a simple misunderstanding. Discuss problems with the entire group as soon as possible, but if that does not work, contact your instructor (or supervisor in a professional setting) so you can sort things out before it is too late. There are usually a number of opportunities to evaluate and assess the group as the project unfolds. However, it is not possible to quit the group or kick someone out without serious repercussions. In the workplace, there is no leaving a group project unless you quit you job.