By L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke
2. Edgar Cardenas (biography)
2. Michael O’Rourke (biography)
As scientific research continues to move towards collaborative knowledge production, scientists must become more adept at working in teams. How can teams improve their chances of collaboration success? What is a good way to facilitate dialogue about shared values, norms and processes of collaboration? Are there ways of anticipating, identifying, and addressing obstacles as they arise?
We have designed a collaboration agreement template to assist teams in:
- Making explicit and therefore transparent important aspects of their approach to collaboration
- Ensuring they have a shared vision for their work together
- Recognizing that their working relationships are dynamic, individually and as a team, and will require flexibility and a willingness to adapt over time
- Establishing expectations for working together, including what they do and say
- Preparing for disagreements and even conflicts, especially in the early stages and along the way when there are changes in team composition.
We designed the collaboration agreement around three central dimensions of collaborative research: team management, team dynamics, and team communication.
- The team management section focuses on developing a shared view of success, holding each other accountable, and deciding how decisions will be made.
- The team dynamics section concerns the establishment of psychological safety in the group and includes questions about managing differences, creating a safe space to work collaboratively, and responding to conflict.
- The third section, team communication, is devoted to norms for communication, both when in dialogue as well as the actual mechanisms for communicating, and strategies for incorporating the different perspectives each member brings to the effort.
- Finally, an appendix includes additional questions that teams can consider. It also invites teams to develop and use their own questions, given that it is not unusual for teams to come across topics that derive value from a conversation and some memorializing.
The following are examples of questions from the template that teams are invited to address:
Team Management
- What does success look like for this project (eg., achieve funding, advance our careers, develop a marketable deliverable, function well as a team, sustain our motivation)?
- How will important project decisions be made for this team (eg., about budgets, funding, reports, team function, user interviews, personnel decisions, data management)?
Team Dynamics
- How will we ensure it is safe for everyone to take a risk in our group (eg., present ideas about the science or the team dynamics that others may think will not work)?
- What process do we follow if we cannot resolve a conflict among ourselves?
Team Communication
- What will our communication norms be? (Communication norms could include: frequency of team communication, plans for addressing communication problems, plans for conducting research meetings, ways of discussing team functioning, what to do if teammates don’t communicate as expected.)
Using the template
We recommend that the whole team meet to complete the template. To stimulate reflection on it, each of the three dimensions is introduced using two prompts (shown below) which team members are asked to score individually and then discuss.
Because team members are not always trained to engage each other in dialogue when different views are shared, we included a primer in the template called “Engaging with Prompts” that provides a brief example of how dialogue might unfold between team members.
- Directions:
Once you have rated the prompt, you can begin the dialogue with the following two statements: (i) “This is what I scored….” followed by (ii) “I scored it this way because…”.
- Example:
Using the prompt: We understand what deep integration looks like in our project.
- Team member 1: “I scored it a 3. I scored it this way because I have been part of projects where the different disciplines really connected the work well and I see that happening in this project. However, the “we” gets me. I don’t know how others understand deep integration because we haven’t discussed it.”
- Team member 2: “I scored it a 4. I scored it this way because I felt like we laid out what integration meant to us in the proposal, and I think we’re hitting those marks. I didn’t score it a 5 because there are people I haven’t spoken to on the project and I’m not sure they are aligned with my interpretation of integration. Is this something we should discuss as a team further?”
- Team member 3: Etc…
- Prompts serve as a mechanism for helping teams reflect on one another’s perspectives and enhance mutual understanding.
After the responses to the prompts have been discussed, the team as a whole develops answers to the questions outlined earlier. An example of how the questions appear in a relevant section of the template is shown below.
The team’s answers should clarify:
- how each question is understood,
- how proposed collaboration steps are to be implemented, and
- how teammates will be held accountable for following these steps.
These responses represent explicit attempts to be transparent about how the team will function in their project.
For a team to realize the full value of their collaboration agreement, they should revisit it from time to time, updating it when appropriate (eg., when there is a change in team membership, when the project vision has shifted, and when tensions arise among team members).
Concluding remarks
The template is a generic version of one originally developed for the US National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator Program. It is based on Bennett et al. (2018) and Hall et al. (2019). The process is based on that used by the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (Hubbs et al. 2020).
Would such a template be useful in your collaborations? Have you developed other ways of fostering transparent processes in your collaborative projects?
To find out more and for a copy of the template:
Bennett, L. M., Cardenas, E. and O’Rourke, M. (2022). Collaboration agreement template (Version 1). Zenodo. (Online): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6394789
References:
Bennett, L. M., Gadlin, H. and Marchand, C. (2018). Collaboration and Team Science Field Guide. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States of America. (Online, open access): https://www.cancer.gov/about-nci/organization/crs/research-initiatives/team-science-field-guide/collaboration-team-science-guide.pdf (850KB PDF)
Hall, K. L., Vogel, A. L. and Crowston, K. (2019). Comprehensive collaboration plans: Practical considerations spanning across individual collaborators to institutional supports. In, K. L. Hall, A. L. Vogel, and R. T. Croyle, (Eds.), Advancing Social and Behavioral Health Research through Cross-Disciplinary Team Science: Principles for Success (pp. 587–612), Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg: Germany. (Online, the chapter is open access): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-20992-6_45
Hubbs, G., O’Rourke, M. and Orzack, S. H. (Eds.). (2020). The Toolbox Dialogue Initiative: The Power of Cross-Disciplinary Practice. CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL, United States of America. (Online): https://www.routledge.com/The-Toolbox-Dialogue-Initiative-The-Power-of-Cross-Disciplinary-Practice/Hubbs-ORourke-Orzack/p/book/9781138341685
Biography: L. Michelle Bennett PhD is the principal at LMBennett Consulting, LLC, based in Potomac, Maryland, USA. Her main areas of interest are creating conditions for innovation within teams and organizations.
Biography: Edgar Cardenas PhD is an associate director for the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative Service Center at Michigan State University in East Lansing, USA. His work focuses on developing collaborative capacity for cross-disciplinary teams through structured dialogue and collective creativity approaches for strategic planning.
Biography: Michael O’Rourke PhD directs the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI) and the Center for Interdisciplinarity at Michigan State University in East Lansing, USA, where he is Professor of Philosophy and faculty in AgBioResearch. He is a founding member of TDI, which has been funded by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and several US National Science Foundation programs.
These tools are very valuable, especially the discussions that surround them. A continued challenge with their implementation is that they take hours to implement fully. I’m not terribly immersed in the team science literature, but wondering if there’s guidance or inclinations among scholars/practitioners toward breaking these apart into smaller modules or chunks. Which are the essential sections/questions to launch a team? Which can be saved until they’re more underway? I think the risk with having these comprehensive documents is that in practice teams or team supporters find them daunting or too time consuming. Additionally, I have found that with very new teams they can be easily glossed over. For example, questions around conflict can tend to be all answered with the response “We’ll talk about it.” This honeymoon period before any real work has gotten started doesn’t give team members a lot to go on in terms of planning. Interested to hear the authors’ and community’s thoughts!
Hello Melanie,
Thank you for your comment. Your comment is referring to 2 aspects we addressed with our NSF teams, what sections are most important to cover, since the agreement can feel overwhelming, and how do you write good norms in these agreements. I want to note that we consider collaboration agreements to be ‘living documents’, you will revise them based on what is working, what is not, and also address any changes to team composition. Explaining this to teams often reduces the anxiety of filling these out, knowing that you don’t have to get everything right but that you will edit these agreements over time to make them a good fit for your team.
What to cover:
Our agreement begins with a few dialogue prompts that we use in our Toolbox Dialogue Method (Michael and I). This is meant to open the conversation around what sorts or alignments the misalignments the team may have. This helps them prioritize what is most important for them to discuss and ‘agree’ on. This also will help them figure out what sections may be easiest for them to fill out. For example, in Team Communication, teams may already have some communication norms that are working, placing them in agreement makes them explicit so that all members can agree. Since this agreement will be updated, they can revisit these norms and discuss what’s working and what isn’t and revise accordingly.
I developed some scaffolding to make it easier for teams to fill out their agreement. The process is meant to reduce the amount of initial effort to start an agreement and to help them build inertia with little wins; it goes:
1. Get some “easy” ideas down to work with: easy ideas are those you may already be using implicitly as a team or things you think would work and be easy to implement. This can also be done with one or two people on the team with the intent of being able to bring the ideas to the larger team for discussion and revision.
2. Take little bites (1%): This one is a bit like exercise, if you try to do too much at the beginning you will likely not be able to keep up the effort which leads to loss of morale. Making small changing to how your team collaborates builds confidence and inertia. Additionally, the aggregate of 1% improvements across multiple sections will have a significant impact on your team.
3. Use memory short cuts: This about your most successful and least successful collaborations, what made them work and what didn’t? If your entire team engages in this form of reflexivity you can come up with lots of ideas about what you want to try and what you want to avoid.
4. Revisit, Reflect, and Revise: I remind teams that their agreement is a living document, they need to update it to make sure it’s working for them. Early in the collaboration they can try things and check back in within a month to see what is and isn’t working. Over time the agreement will get better and require less updating but checking in on what you wrote as a teams helps maintain cohesion.
Developing a good ‘enabling’ norm:
What I mean by enabling is that, as a team, you are creating norms that help you collaborate better because there is a clear behavior component to the norm and the team agrees it’s a norm they want to enact. I like Richard Hackman’s definition of a good norm, “Norms are shared agreements among members about what behaviors are valued in the group, and what behaviors are not. They refer only to behavior, including things members say, not to unexpressed private thoughts and feelings.”
When developing a norm the team then has to ask, “Is the behavior clear?” and “Do we agree to using this norm?” What good question to test the behavior component is to ask, “What does it look like?” In your example on conflict, when they say, “We’ll talk about it.” you can then ask, “What does it look like to talk about it?” Do we do it at the team meeting or 1-on-1? How long before we talk about it? Immediately and in 2 weeks at our scheduled meeting? What conflicts trigger an immediate discussion and which can wait? If you wait will there be discussion before the meeting so that team members have enough information to discuss the situation effectively? Will the PI be there person to lead the discussion? “What does it look like?” opens the door to a discussion that can make norms more behavioral.
Big take aways:
1: Collaboration agreements are living documents, understand that you don’t have to fill them out completely. Start small, revisit, and revise as needed to make the agreement work for your team.
2: Norms need to behavioral so that team member have a clear understanding if they are abiding by an agreed upon norm or not.
I hope this helps Melanie.
Really great insights. Thanks for your thoughtful reply and confirmation that these don’t have to be completed all at once, though of course the risk is someone won’t remember to return to them 🙂
I appreciate the prompt “What does talking about it look it?” as well as the pre-conversation focused on what is highest priority for the team to discuss. Looking forward to future opportunities to test this out!