Agreed! The catching up is a very good idea, I think you’re right Ash about the poor communication within the teams. When starting out with new teams especially, I think it is important to have good communication, to have some kind of team agreement around behaviour and goals within the group, as well as externally for the business. This way you have ground rules as to what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour, just in case things aren’t going well.
Something that drew me to UX, apart from being user focused, was the need to have empathy, and that people who you find in UX (in my experience) tend to be really lovely people. Sometimes I wonder whether it is UX or I’ve been spoiled for work mates! I never thought that defining how you should and shouldn’t act was necessary as I thought that in general in a work place or team professionalism and common sense are key. What I didn’t realise was that sometimes they are important, even if to have a set of guidelines so that if you are feeling like your team isn’t working as well together, or someone is behaving in a way that effects you negatively, you have something to go back to. You can then say, hey, we agreed to be like this, I’m not sure we are meeting these goals or ground rules anymore, what can we do to improve this. Or, I’m not feeling like my contributions are being listened to because…
So rather than just having to reach out to your manager, you can first try to work internally as a team to improve. - But again this will only work if people are willing.
Another trick that can sometimes help is to know your personality type, and also find out what theirs is. There is a whole lot of information around working with different personalities, and sometimes this can help you change tack to something that may work better.
Totally true Ash that these things can be learning experiences, or the other term I’ve heard is character building :p.
One thing I’m interested around is the nomenclature, as two people can be having a discussion and be completely confused as to what the other person is saying. Two things around this, one being the difference of words, the other being coming from a different background, the difference of opinion around topics such as process and how things should be done.
A possible solution around the different words that mean the same thing was a glossary of words. But what I’m curious about is how do you come to a compromise or agreement on what terms to use, what the processes should be, what the definitions of things actually are. What happens if an agreement around these can’t be reached?