Get to Know Your Team

Get to Know Your Team

Building a high-performing growth team starts with understanding the people on it. Beyond skills and experience, knowing your team members' communication styles, motivations, and working preferences. Being aware of defense mechanisms within teams also helps build understanding creates the foundation for effective collaboration and trust. Growth teams operate in high-pressure environments with uncertain outcomes, and the quality of interpersonal relationships directly affects how well the team navigates challenges together.

Why It Matters

Growth teams operate under pressure. They run experiments with uncertain outcomes, face tight deadlines, and need to collaborate across different disciplines. When team members understand each other's strengths, stress responses, and preferred ways of working, they can navigate these challenges more effectively and with less friction.

Teams where members know each other well communicate more efficiently. They can anticipate how colleagues will react to setbacks, know when someone needs support, and understand how to give feedback in ways that are received constructively. This interpersonal knowledge is not a luxury. It is a practical capability that directly affects the team's speed, creativity, and resilience.

Practical Approaches

Building mutual understanding does not require expensive off-sites or team-building exercises. It requires consistent, intentional effort in daily interactions:

• Use personality and working style assessments (like DISC, MBTI, or StrengthsFinder) as conversation starters, not labels. The value is in the discussion these tools generate, not in the categories they assign.
• Hold regular one-on-ones focused on understanding each person's goals, challenges, and preferences. Ask about their working style, their career aspirations, and what energizes or drains them.
• Create opportunities for informal interaction that build trust outside of work tasks. Shared meals, coffee conversations, and casual check-ins all contribute to team cohesion.
• Discuss openly how each team member prefers to receive feedback and handle disagreements. These conversations are awkward but save enormous friction later.
• Share context about your own working style and preferences. Vulnerability from leaders encourages openness from the rest of the team.

Building Understanding Across Disciplines

Growth teams are cross-functional by design, which means team members often come from very different professional backgrounds. A marketer, a data analyst, an engineer, and a designer may have very different approaches to problem-solving, different communication styles, and different expectations about how work should be done. Investing time in understanding these differences prevents misunderstandings and builds the kind of mutual respect that enables effective collaboration.

Consider having team members shadow each other or present their work processes to the group. When the marketer understands what the engineer's workflow looks like, and vice versa, they can communicate more effectively and set more realistic expectations about timelines and deliverables.

The Payoff

Teams that invest time in knowing each other perform better during high-stakes moments. They communicate more efficiently, resolve conflicts faster, and support each other through the inevitable failures that come with experimentation. This investment in relationships is not a soft luxury. Understanding what drives good group dynamics provides a framework for this work. It is a practical performance advantage that compounds over time. The teams that know each other best are the teams that learn fastest, adapt most effectively, and ultimately drive the most growth.