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Colleagues

How to help your colleagues perform better with the Meta-Problem Method

Is it a group, or a team?

Navigating team dynamics, including your own role within the team, can pose some tricky dilemmas. The Meta-Problem Method can help you resolve them.

One of the first dilemmas you’ll face when joining a new group of colleagues is figuring out whether they know how to act as a team. How well do they collaborate? Do they know how to bring out the best in each other? Can they critique each other’s work in a way that generates new options rather than conflict? Where are the decision-making boundaries?

Charcoal image of shaking hands

Goals (theirs and yours)

There are three sets of goals that need to complement each other – your own, your individual colleagues’, and the collective goal of the team.

It’s important that everyone has a shared understanding of the collective team goal, and to check the team’s work constantly against that goal. Do you have the right set of colleagues on the team? What is the best use of your skills?

Ideally the team should make decisions together based on how they will help both the team and individual goals. For example, should we use this project to learn a new (and possibly riskier) technology? Should a junior person lead this project, or someone more senior?

Each scenario might be a developmental opportunity for the team, an individual, or both They also have ramifications and risks that you will have to weigh.

Coworkers high five

Working styles

A team must be able to accommodate a variety of working styles without compromising the goals or creating tension. How healthy are the working relationships between colleagues on the team? How compatible are the individual working styles? Who tends to dominate in meetings, who looks for ways to build, who is a constructive critical thinker, etc.? What role should you play in the team?

Results versus effort

The Meta-Problem Method helps frame decisions in terms of goals and effort. When people are torn between different options, you can ask “which of these options is likely to deliver the most progress towards our goal, for the least effort?”

Making your choice explicitly about the costs and benefits of the different options makes it easier to see the situation clearly. Sometimes the biggest insight is that no one wanted to pick one of the options you had because they were all lousy. Once you’ve realized that, everyone can focus on finding better options instead.

Choose an example below to learn more about the Meta-Problem Method and how it can help guide your choices.