Teamwork & Collaboration: The art and practice of multiple individuals or teams working together synergistically, leveraging diverse strengths and perspectives to achieve outcomes greater than what’s possible through individual effort alone. At its core, it requires building trust, fostering open communication, and maintaining shared accountability while working toward common goals. This dynamic process thrives in environments where team members actively share knowledge, ideas, and responsibilities, demonstrating respect for different viewpoints and a collective commitment to excellence. Through continuous learning, adaptive practices, and coordinated effort, teams can tackle complex challenges, drive innovation, and consistently deliver exceptional results that propel organizational success.
Join Andy Cleff as he chats with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas about the 20th Anniversary Edition of the Pragmatic Programmer, the book that every software engineer seems to recommend to each other, and dutifully so!
Listen in as Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby discuss their new book “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams” with hosts Collen Johnson and Andy Cleff. Distributed work is not the same as collocated work. But agile principles can be adapted and applied to distributed teams.
Think about your organization or work unit. Do they value innovation and employee participation? If you believe the answer is “yes,” read on.
On the other hand, if your organization is truly cursed by silence, and the risk of speaking up far exceeds the value, if you can’t quite decide between apathy or silent resistance, you can skip ahead to the conclusion!
Breaking the hard-trodden soil of silence at the worker-bee level will not be an easy task. It will take a great deal of courage, resilience, and vulnerability. It will also be tough to plow alone. That’s where alliances come in. Let’s work through all of this, one row at a time.
With a shared definition of the dimensions of silence and voice as well as an understanding of why silence is not golden, let’s explore some of the organizational dynamics and leadership behaviors that cause employees to feel their opinions are not valued and result in disengaged or self-protective behaviors.
People in all kinds of jobs, all kinds of organizations, all kinds of situations, reach a point where they want to say, “Enough.” They have the same uncomfortable realization: “I should do something about this.” Yet many remain silent. They don’t bring ideas forward.
