In every team/group environment, there has to be some great chemistry between all group members. The team/group leader should be able to identify every member's strengths and opportunities to make sure everyone is in a position to be successful and complete the project. Being able to give and receive feedback as a team member and team leader is also huge for encouraging members to perform at a high level. Team members should have input on the development of a project, not just the leader. 

Hello Leah,

This was a fantastic discussion post, and I appreciated how you connected the subject to your experience as a former athlete. Teamwork is essential in every industry, to answer your question; in the life sciences and biotech sector, it acts as a unifying factor and a source of answers. Teams with members from different disciplines, such as pharmacy, business, IT, marketing, chemists, doctors, and more, are better suited to collaborate. Being able to communicate and work effectively with people who are different from us is crucial because diversity can be a major roadblock to productive teamwork. Taking the time to get to know one another and recognize the subtle differences that make each member special is also crucial.Knowing and understanding how you as an individual work with others, learning how others work in a team, uplifting each other, being active learners and listeners and more will create advancement and rewards for the team as a whole.

Hi Leah, 

Great discussion overall. I can completely relate. I too held positions on various amount of teams as a teenager and throughout college working with my counterparts on executive boards. The connection with a team is very important as it will affect the overall effectiveness and quality of the final product. Working on a team it can be quite difficult when each person has different communication and learning styles. The most important aspect of teamwork is to ensure each person on the team is aware of their role and responsibilities within the team. Utilizing the time spent with one another to learn a little bit more about what each person brings to the table can help the group dynamic and the tasks that are given throughout the project. Being able to understand each other allows for developments, planning phases, and discussions regarding the product life cycle to come easily and drive other teams that one has to work with to work well together because of the work done by the product team. Overall great discussion post Leah and I am looking forward to hearing from you more throughout the duration of this course. 

The very common saying of 'there is no I in team' has monumental impact in not just the biotechnology industry but the workplace as a whole. It is upmost critical that teams work together, in synchronous harmony, to meet a common goal or objective. This has to do with being able to complement each other's weaknesses with a strength that can be used to supplement their weakness. This plays crucially into assignment of roles in a team and project management, which allows everyone to be active and committed to a role they feel most comfortable and proficient in. Being able to recognize who excels in what and supplementing weaknesses with a team member will not only create an inter-environment of friendliness and teamwork, but also engage in learning development time that allows weaknesses to be addressed and built on. Like any other industry, a project of significance is no easy feat to achieve by oneself, and a good team leader will be able to recognize the significance of working together and maintaining an operable, positive atmosphere which permits and improve morale and efficiency.

I would like to piggy-back off of what both of y'all said by adding that the personal relationship one has with other people within the group is crucial to success. I remember one of the greatest warnings we got as undergraduates when starting a Capstone project was "Don't make a group with your friends." This always puzzled me. I guess it all just relates to knowing your friends well enough to get the work done, and our professors' assumption was "you know who your friends are and their work ethic... you don't want to be fighting over this project." I feel like the personal connections you make with people (that are a part of the project), OUTSIDE of the project work itself, leads to the fluidity of teamwork you will see in the assignment. I would argue that having a close relationship with the people you work with creates and even more productive and honest environment. Not only do you see the strengths and weaknesses of these people by getting to know them better, but you also have the ability to gain a closeness that may have been limited by just speaking about business itself and nothing else. Communication about where someone is lagging or advancing in the assignment is crucial. By having that interpersonal relationship with someone on an even deeper level, the walls that may limit creativity and straightforwardness can be brought down and further improve the project.

Teamwork is essential in the Medical Device Development, Life Sciences and Biotech Industries, and it is the glue that ties everything together and generates answers.  Researchers in many fields, currently recognize that no single person can contribute all the necessary expertise to solve increasingly complex problems.  Group dynamics don’t always go smoothly, particularly within the life sciences.  Trained to nurture their visions, researchers can struggle to interweave their efforts and become a team.  Multidisciplinary teams are the core of Biopharma, and Medical Device Development Projects.  The collaboration of talent from physicians to biomedical engineers, chemists, toxicologists, pharmacologists, etc., as well as members who cover programming, data management, IT, and biostatistics, to the production, sales, and marketing team members, brings a project to ultimate fruition.  Their collaboration produces the drugs, medical devices, diagnostics, etc., that change the world.  The world is so complex, no one person has the skills or knowledge to accomplish all that we want to accomplish.  Interdisciplinary teams are the way to make that happen.  Creating highly functional teams within teams and then joining them into one group, often across the country and sometimes globally, is a science in itself.  It begins with understanding the difference between task work and teamwork.  Taskwork is the actual work that must be accomplished to complete the project.  While teamwork involves the interrelated thoughts, feelings and behaviors of team members that enable them to work effectively together.   Understanding the elements of teamwork is vital.  How well people work together may be more important than how well they work on the tasks.  What elements produce a cohesive, productive team?  A team consists of four roles –contributors, communicators, challengers, and collaborators.  During the course of a project, individuals can fill multiple roles.  Contributors: Work on a specific piece of the project, delivering the results to the team.  Communicators: Keep track of social interactions, heals conflict, and keeps various team members informed.  Challengers: Question – or challenge – ideas and results, ensuring hidden glitches are discovered, and the outcome is successful.  Collaborators: Articulates the vision, clarifying the goal, and keeping the team united as they move forward.  Covering all the roles is not the only factor. In the Medical Device, Life Sciences and Biotech industries, teams often consist of professionals from different cultural backgrounds. It is essential to spend time getting to know each other and understanding the distinctions that define each member. It’s not the differences we can see, but the deeper factors –personality traits, values, abilities, thought processes, etc. –make a significant impact on a team’s cohesiveness. These factors have been labeled the ABCs of teamwork; the attitudes, behaviors, and cognitive states that individually and together affect a team’s success.  Team science research reveals that collaborating across organizational, geographic, and cultural boundaries and disciplines increase productivity and scientific impact.  Bringing them together requires both trust and members’ psychological safety –the freedom to share ideas, questions, concerns, etc.  While we have been creating teams to achieve shared goals for a long time, understanding methods and processes helps teams become more efficient and, ultimately, successful.  What’s changing is the understanding and appreciation that there is a science behind how to manage teams. Teams are complex systems. The more you can manage them using a scientific basis, the better your teams will be.

It is definitely important to assess the diverse skillset of a team before initiating a project. Most of what project management is is getting work done by time and delivering it to the customer so a manager has to figure out how to divide the labor of individual projects, assess the skillset of the team, and assign/collaborate these projects with the team members to get it done on time. I work as an engineering intern and work with the PMs to get their deliverables done on time so a lot of this includes clearly communicating the ideas effectively, being accountable when stuff goes wrong, control the quality in some way(which is related to communication), and collectively make decisions to ensure that stuff gets done on time. Efforts put in by team members bridge the gap between project planning and project execution which leads to delivering high quality parts to the customer. 

I really like this question as I am an athlete myself. I have learned the value of teamwork and the makeup of a good team throughout my years as a basketball player and I think that the lessons learned there are directly applicable to a project management team environment. Some great points were brought up already, including that a good team has a diverse makeup and that your friends may not necessarily make the best team for you. I'd like to expand on these to start. I agree that a team of people with diverse skill sets is crucial to having a successful project experience as the exchange of different ideas from different knowledge backgrounds enhances innovation and problem-solving. At the same time, with a diverse team it is necessary to have clear roles and responsibilities for each member so that everyone is working within their strengths. On the other hand, a diverse group may come across conflict as with any group, including a group of friends. In this case, a group of friends may not be the best project team if it is difficult to be transparent about issues throughout the project process. This is something that should be taken into account when choosing a project team. With this, I'd like to add a point of my own from my experience on basketball teams for my whole life. Within a team it is essential that all members can identify the most efficient way to communicate with each other. Some team members may prefer a complimentary way of delivering a criticism while other may prefer getting right to the point. This is just one example of the small nuances that can make a big difference in having a successful team. 

Reading your post and replies I want to say-yes true, it is important to understand those in your team and be able to work with them.

However, I'd like to emphasize a really important point. Most of the time you'll have no say in who your team is. From my perspective, this above all is, is the most important understanding one must have when working on a project. Depending on the field, on the company, on the project, people may have more flexibility. They may be able to place certain team members in certain positions that highlight their strengths. This, of course, would do nothing but to help a project run more smoothly.

Unfortunately, in the many more companies, you can't decide on who you work with. It's decided for you, based on the availability of others and based on the scale of the project. Sometimes the manager may not even have much of a choice, if for example, their team is small to begin with; they can't cherry pick individuals to work on certain aspects of the project. With this being said, I think its important to realize that you won't always get along well with your peers, or even agree with the approach they may take to their work. They may not even do their work well, leading to more work for yourself. 

To answer your question, yes, it is very important to understand your team. That in itself is a very hard skill to have as you're working to overcome your own biased perspective at times or theirs. But it may not always be possible to work closely as a team and have great chemistries. Often times its not possible, and that's ok. You just always need to make sure that you're able to communicate in a way that they and you can understand; professionally, respectfully, and constructively. 

In my opinion, teamwork is a very important aspect of getting a project done, but despite that not always will you be placed in an ideal team, I believe part of being a project manager means also understanding how people get work done and how to play in their strengths instead of pushing people towards one direction. During my time interning as a hardware and software project manager I noticed how varied both departments schedules were, where people in software at this company worked more sporadically, completing tickets at random times throughout the work day, sometimes working late if they decided to come in later in the morning, mainly working at times that benefited them. While hardware engineers were very centered on the 9-5 and were able to pause their work at 5pm. Part of the challenges I faced while working their was balancing their workflows so that  they'd be able to collaborate better with each other 

I believe, that when working in a team knowing individual strengths and weaknesses facilitates better collaboration knowing what each team member is good at and where they need improvement can really help reduce stress by making task distribution smoother and communication better.

But it’s also important to give everyone a chance to tackle tasks they might not be strong in, as long as the tasks are not too overwhelming.It requires careful consideration of each team member's current workload and the potential impact of stretching them beyond their usual tasks. This way, they can learn and grow in those areas