While cleaning out my old room, I saw this one-pager titled "Hints for Team Projects" that I'd stuck to my wall back in university. It was shared with me by somebody taking a class with Tracey Gurton, an OBHR lecturer at UBC's Sauder School of Business. At the time, it resonated with me a lot so I had decided to tape it up on my wall and follow the sage advice for many years of my schooling.

Today, after a number of years working in a variety of professions and workplace settings, the points of this one-pager still resonate strongly with me. I sincerely believe that if we could take this advice to heart, that we could avoid many of the problems faced in the workplace stemming from interpersonal issues.

Credits: This is an updated version of the one-pager prepared by Tracey Gurton; it is re-produced here with permission from the original author. Thanks Tracey!

Hints for Team Projects

1. Build trust first. Do NOT leap into tasks and roles and assigned duties.
   • Spend some time together getting to know one another or (in some cases) getting to know each other better. Share personal information about your family or background, or hometown, or hobbies – or all of these things. Disclosing – and showing vulnerability – builds trust, and you’re going to need trust.
   • Have fun during this time. Eat (you should always bring food to meetings).
   • You might think, “We don’t have time; we have to get stuff done.” You will SAVE time later by putting in effort here now, even if later is tomorrow or this afternoon.
2. Create a common goal together. This might be a grade you wish to achieve, or a level of professionalism, or a mission to move people to action. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. A common objective brings a team’s focus into alignment. Create short-term objectives as well.
3. If you have worked with a particular team member before, and you weren't impressed, try to give that person a clean slate. Self-fulfilling prophesies are very powerful – and folks will behave pretty much as you expect them to. Do not share your immediate concerns with other teammates thereby polluting their own perceptions.
   • If you need to fix your relationship with that person, then go off for a private conversation and communicate. Be kind, be gentle, be honest and come to a collaborative commitment to work well together this time. Avoid blame.
4. As a team, agree on Terms of Engagement, where you establish explicit norms and guidelines for the behaviour you expect from each other: the quality of work, accountability to deadlines, etc. Watch assumptions. Folks often have different ideas on how to work together. This is your time to get such factors out in the open.
   • Have fun. Eat :) 
5. In the next meeting, or stage (and only then) can you brainstorm content and assign tasks, roles and deadlines.
6. Remember to work together. Don’t just send folks off to do their piece then come back later to patchwork it together. Instructors know when you've done that, and it’s not pretty. You can certainly divide the work, especially research elements, but communicate often and agree on major concepts as a team. What can happen is that people show up at a final meeting too committed to their particular component without understanding that it may not mesh with the whole.
   • In decision-making, do not force consensus. It gives every team member veto power; and you may get nowhere fast. Put your ego aside and realize that a given direction might not be exactly what you thought would be perfect. Commit to it; get up, brush off and move on. If your team has trust, there will be no need to save face or be embarrassed if you change your mind, switch opinions or give in. You’re not being weak, you’re being a good team member.
7. The final pulling together of written work is an enormous undertaking. Put your best writers on the job and give them plenty to edit and polish. That said, do your part properly first. Ask a friend or family member to review what you intend to submit. Does it make sense to someone who has never heard the theories?
   • Stringing together several pages all created by different participants is painful to read and strikingly obvious (especially if you don’t even fix the font and type size).
8. When it’s all done, celebrate.
9. When you get your work back, debrief, and decide what you would do differently next time.