Best project ever! – Use this Communication Kick-off templateReading time 9 minutes

Teamwork. You know that feeling when you have a team working together where the chemistry of the team just works? Everyone knows each other’s strengths, weaknesses, roles, attitudes, and purpose. The stuff you build comes out in good quality almost effortlessly. It’s a great feeling and in my ~18-year career, there are only a handful of truly near perfect team compositions that can turn even a less interesting project into a meaningful journey and a golden memory of “I wish all projects were like that”.

I wanted to put my thoughts down on how come all projects can’t be like that? What creates that feeling in you and your team? What are the conflict areas that are more destructive than progressive?

Inspiration for this “Communication Kick-off” -post came from my efforts on improving communication of our teams at Zure and a fantastic professional Alan Colville I met at Global Service Design Conference 2024 at Helsinki, Finland.

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What breaks a team?

We all know this is a complex thing to unravel. So many changing factors, yet a few common reasons I have personally experienced are poor communication, lack of purpose, and narrow perspective. These points can lead to conflict which can break your team and along with it, all you work on.

💢 Poor communication

In my opinion, the arch villain of this story. Learning the timing, phrasing and clarity of your message to others is important. It also involves listening first. This is why a Communication Kick-off style start for your collaboration sets a healthy start. Communication is not even about how friendly you must be. You can be blunt and even provocative, but you must be aware of the people you are speaking to, keep your phrasing respectful, and avoid making assumptions.

I recently learned from aforementioned Alan Colville’s speak ‘Prepare to disagree’ where he talks about embracing the conflict. It’s ok to get heated, disagree and debate over things! Sometimes people simply hide in compliance, stay in the comfort and create artificial harmony. A bit of destruction in to your collaboration can help balance when paired with constructive counter points to find the sweet spot for your team. When a person is not there to ONLY win a debate or push an agenda, and is open to views of the others, this can be super fruitful in creating working relationships.

“Lean into the messiness of disagreement and embrace the conflict.”

~ Alan Coville

Just as important in team communication is to agree on the tools, ways and frequency of communication. This brings in the discussion of personalities too since we are different in our ways and work-world views. Some have issues focusing for long, some have hard time internalizing long written formats and prefer more verbose and verbal formats, some need a whole day to catch up on a single topic when they are doing multiple things at the same time. Share these communicative styles and differences openly with your team!

💢 Narrow perspective

Narrow perspective is closely linked to communication. By discussing the common goal and team approach with your team and key customer stakeholders at the start of the project, you can more easily manage any conflicts that arise, whether they involve expectations, time, budget, requirements, or interpersonal issues.

You don’t all have to have common values, world views and drive a yellow car. You have to simply open up enough to care about what other people care about. This way, the conflict situation such as:

1. a person not being able to deliver a task in time, where it cascades
2. in to QA not being able to test it on time
3. in to product owner panicking over release getting delayed
4. in to company board members questioning the profitability of the whole project
5. in to product owner panicking even more and losing control over the roadmap, budget and bringing the Hammer of Anger & Destructive Conflict down on the development team…

might be easier to unravel when everyone simply knows other team members position and mind state. Clear and improve the situation with understanding, empathy, right tools, and progressive communication, BEFORE it is too late to resolve.

“Failed collaboration leads to severe consequences, ranging from negative emotions like hate, frustration, and embarrassment, to high turnover rates, increased costs, and reduced revenue”.

~Nielsen Norman Group

💢 Lack of purpose

Purpose can be very subjective. We create purpose ourselves. In the team setting, there is always a common goal to be found. You can have many of them, just one or it can even be splintered into 100 small goals. The goal might not be something that excites a person or drives them, but the journey could.

Personally, I would not find great satisfaction in a goal where I must design a surveillance system for ill purposes or re-iterating a style of a button in Figma for the 8th time in a week just to please one person’s whims. Same with designing a editable ‘Help Wiki’ for a company’s internal tool where I know already from the beginning that there will be no one using this tool (this has happened). Lots of effort for no pay-off or purpose.

In a team where everyone might think the final result is not super meaningful, you can still find purpose in doing a really great quality results, teach the team and customer to have more purpose on the next thing to build, and learn new things yourself, while having pleasant time together. The attention to detail or simply aligning individual personal goals can make the work taste a whole lot better.

Communication kick-off in just 1 hour

A concept of “Communication kick-off” has been a Zure thing for years. Before even I joined about 4 years ago. I took it over for improvement with a colleague ~2 years ago and it has seen some iterations. Basic idea of it is to understand each others’ personalities and get to know each other at the very beginning of the project.

DISC self-assessment model

On first iteration, we tried using the DISC self-assessment model as a light-weight base for the discussion and in effort to open people’s mind to each other. Especially in Finnish IT world, there’s definitely a lot of analytical and introvert type people, so the vibe can be a bit reserved.

This approach where we encouraged people to use these different personality types to describe themselves proved to open up some discussions on how person behaves and approaches matters at work life. Important to note, we focus on work personality on purpose. People can be sometimes different in their off-time, and it is up to the person to bring that side on the table.

In the end, I decided to not use the DISC model after a year of trying it. The reason is that it led people on too much. It helped people to open up, but every time people go through the categories and descriptors like a checklist. It affected too much of their description of themselves. I did not like that and saw too many similar descriptions occur. I wanted them to simply dig into their real persona and let that come out as they see fit saying it.

📑Communication kick-off template

I decided to make things much simpler and use question format with the main areas I’d like people to talk about in the beginning. Just to get to know each other and build trust with open dialogue. Not too guiding questions.

I encourage you to take 1h with your team and go through these topic slides person by person. See if it brings some new perspective, clarity of work ways and common purpose to whole team.

1) Purpose (of the communication kick-off)

• Gain better understanding of your team members, yourself, working together and differences in communication styles.
• Everyone in turn answers to the stated question. Everyone should feel free to add your own thoughts after each person as they bubble up even after you’ve taken your turn.
• As a facilitator, try to avoid giving any analysis of a person’s output. Simply listen and guide, so that everyone feels as safe as possible to share.

2) Working times

Here we are looking to sync rhythm and timing factors. Are there clashes? People can have personal reasons that force them to work sporadically, leave early, start late, or simply have a habit of being the most efficient at ten to midnight while firing messages to rest of the team members already asleep.

When are you at your most efficient?

Other timing or time factors that comes to mind?

3) Communication ways

We communicate differently. Let everyone share their preference of ways to have a dialogue, which tools they really like to use or which ones frustrate them. Do another round with the second question if it does not come out initially, share with others how comfortable you are directly talking to customer. This can already help with sharing tips and better prepare to create strong team communication plan with different customer roles and their available tools.

What do you like/dislike to use when communicating?

What about when communicating with a customer?

4) Personalities

Give everyone here 3 minutes to write down in silence some bullet points on the questions. The question can be daunting when first seen and heard. Good way to guide people is to say “Just write down your 3 strengths as a single word”, then they can expand that verbally. This one is really the wildcard of the event! The discussion can go anywhere from here, so let it flow for a while and see what kind of topics to grasp on that people could use as strengthening and supporting way in going forward. Find relatable traits between people that compliment them.

How do you describe yourself as a person at work?

What are your strengths that could help and enable others to succeed?

5) Motivation

This is positive vibing between the team. It can be anything really. Someone might be super excited to show what they are capable of doing as a rookie or new employee at the company. Some might really wanna work with a tool, domain or tech involved! Share it! Get energized together! Use it all to find more purpose. Equally, if the team notices together that someone really is not vibing at all, that’s an opportunity for supporting that person to find the motivation through common goal or other way.

What makes you excited at the moment and gives you positive energy at work?

6) Feedback

End the session on a continuous factor. How do people like to receive and give feedback? This often simply yields a statement of “Well just say it to my face straight, I don’t mind.”. Perfect! It is almost like giving a permission openly with all to one and one to all. If there’s some specific other way like monthly 30 minute “Teams chat appreciation moment” then it’s nice to give people an opportunity to share it for trying out.

I like to give and receive feedback in [ … ]

End of session

That’s it! There’s no need to force notes, create actions, or anything. Often discussion does end up in concrete matters like “Let’s create private Teams/Slack channel”, “Schedule dailies/weeklies”, or “So how do we build the backlog with customer?”. It’s up to the team to just continue with their flow from there. When the team composition changes with time and new people join in, we run this session again.

Parting words

I hope anyone using this simple template remixes it to fit your own group and you find new questions and topics. One topic I am personally going to add to this is “Expectations”. I would like to ask the team what they expect from other team members and the customer? This could add a splash of goal and purpose drive to the beginning of the project.

Often there’s not a lot of conflict at the very beginning of the project, but I do believe that the team chemistry needs to be cultivated all the way from the beginning and spread it to the customer side together as a team.

With open and genuine communication skills, you gain allies and partners in your customer and every conflict in the future becomes easier to handle, becomes less destructive and more constructive. I’ve personally internalized the ‘art of owning up’ that seems to be super fitting way for me, especially in discussing one-on-one as a team lead with customer’s product owner about difficult matters. We tell each other where the pressure and stress comes from and own up to our responsibilities and together try to genuinely solve the matter without ego tripping over our closed biased mind.

🖇️ Connect with me on LinkedIn if you’d like to exchange notes on this topic or wish to get help in your own team to run this kind of communication kickoff!