Smells Like Team Spirit - I

“More hands make for lighter work.” “Two heads are better than one.” “The more the merrier.” As a kid I always thought these sayings were just that—sayings. Who needed other people when I had Me! I could work faster, better and best of all I didn’t have to worry about anyone slowing me down. After all, like I said, I was second only to The Flash at everything I did.  All this was of course before I graduated and joined a production house. 

Now saying that you can’t go solo at a project is absolutely not true. Of course you can! That is, if you have unlimited time, patience and you have the knowledge to do everything in said project. ‘Cause when you’re ‘on the floor,’ as they say, time is a luxury you don’t have (try having a supervisor breathing down your neck as you’re doling out a masterpiece) and knowledge is more instinct then anything else. 

I learned early on that being a ‘Team-Player’ is almost as important as having a killer skill set. So many supremely talented people I know crashed and burnt because they couldn’t communicate with their colleagues or were too uptight about sharing their knowledge or were just plain old lone players. A good team is any day more productive, creative, and motivated than individuals on their own.

As a student, a group project is the most effective way to build your ability to work and deal with other people early on. I say ‘deal with’ because when have 2 individuals come together and had less then 3 ideas? It’s not a cakewalk and you don’t find like-minded soul-mate type people every time. But you got to work with what you have.

Here's one way to work around this. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! Cannot not say this enough. That doesn’t mean that you become a problem-sprouting machine. It means that unspoken assumptions and issues are the curse of working in a team. You just have to talk to each other about what works and what doesn’t.  In a production environment, a bunch of people with varying talents and egos are usually thrown together to work on one project. If you sit quiet a 100 times out of 10 (yeah, that’s the ratio) you’ll have people dumping work on you and basically walking all over you. If you are too aggressive people will cringe from wanting to work with you.

So what do you do? Play it cool for one. Don’t be a doormat but don’t shrink from work. I wasn’t born with this insight—I actually lived it. I was part of a project right out of college and it was just 4 of us. We were building a game module and that needed boats of research, tons of creativity and some killer organizational skills. Since we were all relatively new we didn’t assign a clear team lead (we all thought we were too awesome to be reporting to any one person) nor did we lay down too many ground rules on how things should be done. We were too pumped to get the idea running and take it to a potential buyer to worry about ‘trivial’ things like this.  Not too long into the project these so called trivial things started to become major hindrances. I felt too many responsibilities were being dumped on me alone. One felt that his ideas were being steamrolled over by the others. Three of us felt the fourth person in the group had just stopped being productive and was just not interested in being part of the project any more.

If we hadn’t met a mentor who had taught all of us in our college days, we probably would have parted ways and let the project die. Thankfully said mentor knocked some sense into us. He told us that we had to be professional in our outlook and not let personal friendships or new rivalries get in the way of a potentially great idea. The concept of ‘Weeklies’ was introduced to us this way. ‘Weeklies’ are meetings held every week by a team to assess progress made on a project, areas of difficulty, set new targets, do creative brainstorming, talk about any existing problems or ones that could crop up and ways to tackle them. Also, a ‘Weekly’ is the best time to thrash out any issues that group members have with each other—someone stepping on someone else’s toes, someone slacking off and so on.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much this helped us. Our productivity must have gone through the roof in the few weeks that followed. We worked far more cohesively and professionally than even teams in big time production houses do. What happened with our project is a story for another time but I like to think that students at FX School get to learn this even before they hit the market. The group projects that they have to work on in the classroom are a staging ground for them because when they do hit the ground or ‘the floor,’ unlike us, they hit it running.

I could go on and on, but information overload is a buzz kill. So tune in for more such nuggets of wisdom in next week’s blog.