The Art of Working Together

An orchestra is more than its conductor

Watch a group of musicians find their way through a passage together. Someone leads; others anticipate, listen and respond. The conductor can signal a change, but cannot play every instrument. The music depends on the relationship between parts.

Working with other people can feel like that. A colleague asks a question that changes the direction of a meeting. Someone notices an overlooked detail. A quieter person takes time to think and returns with the idea that moves everyone forward. None of those contributions is an ornament. They change what the group can do.

I like the orchestra as a picture, although it has its limits. Most teams do not have a score. They often have to decide what they are trying to make while they are making it. And not everyone wants to take their cue from a conductor.

Finding a shared rhythm

Dance makes another part of the picture visible. Two people cannot simply follow the same steps independently and call that dancing together. They notice where the other person is, make space, lead sometimes and follow sometimes. A change in one person's movement asks something of the other.

Researchers call the wider process joint action: two or more people coordinate their actions to change something in the world. A review of joint action research describes several ways this can happen. We may share information about a goal, anticipate one another's next move or adjust as we go. The review argues against treating all coordination as one simple mechanism.

Music and movement studies provide some interesting but mixed evidence about what coordinating in time does between people. A meta-analysis of interpersonal synchrony experiments found positive average effects on several prosocial outcomes. Yet a controlled field experiment in children did not replicate the striking effect of an earlier musical synchrony study. There is enough here to be curious, not enough to promise that a group exercise will transform workplace performance.

The more useful question for me is practical: when do we need to move together, and when does the work benefit from someone taking a different route?

Making room for another contribution

Some of us need quiet thinking space before speaking. Others discover the shape of an idea by talking it through. A quick answer can feel helpful to one of us and premature to another. Without a shared language, the difference is easy to misread as disengagement, control or lack of confidence.

That is why we do our best work when we play to our preferences. It is a belief about all of us, not a promise that everyone gets their preferred conditions all the time. We have to make room for each other's preferences and for the demands of the work. Sometimes the meeting needs both a lively discussion and a pause before the decision.

Research into group performance offers a related clue. In two studies involving 699 people in small groups, researchers found a group performance factor across varied tasks. It was associated with average social sensitivity and more equal conversational turn taking. That finding does not tell us precisely how any given team should run its meetings. It does invite us to notice whose voice is heard and what happens when someone makes space for another.

A different study of psychological safety and learning in work teams examined whether people feel able to take interpersonal risks such as asking, speaking up and acknowledging uncertainty. Its relevance here is straightforward: a contribution cannot help the team if a person does not feel able to offer it.

The picture keeps changing

Our working days are made of more than big decisions. They are made of handovers, questions, pauses, explanations, interruptions and the small adjustments we make towards one another. We repeat them often enough that they begin to feel like the way things are done around here.

Our language and behaviour shape how our culture is. Culture is not simply something an organisation has. And thankfully, that means each of us can help shape how it is.

That is the thought behind The art of working together. The first picture has several people, each doing something different, and a small Sariio mark waiting to be found. The point is not to find a perfect arrangement. It is to look again, notice what someone else brings and ask what becomes possible when we work with that.

Take the free MAPS survey to discover your myMAP. Invite someone to share and compare theirs. Then start with a question you can actually use: What helps each of us do our best work together?

That’s exciting!

Sources and further reading

1. Joint Action: Mental Representations, Shared Information and General Mechanisms for Coordinating with Others, review of mechanisms of joint action.
2. Prosocial Consequences of Interpersonal Synchrony: A Meta-Analysis, review of experimental findings.
3. Interpersonal Musical Synchronization and Prosocial Behavior in Children: No Effects in a Controlled Field Experiment, contrasting result.
4. Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups, Woolley and colleagues, 2010.
5. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Edmondson, 1999.

FAQs

What is the art of working together?

It is the everyday practice of paying attention to what other people bring to a shared task, making your own contribution visible, and adjusting together as the work unfolds. Music and dance make coordination easy to see, but a workplace needs different rhythms too. The aim is not for everyone to think or act alike. It is to find a way for different approaches to contribute to the same work.

Does synchronising with others improve teamwork at work?

Experiments on movement and music have found associations between synchrony and some forms of affiliation or prosocial behaviour, but results vary and some experiments have failed to replicate earlier effects. That evidence does not show that synchronising a team will improve its productivity. The useful workplace lesson is more modest: notice timing, turn taking and how people respond to each other, then agree what helps the work.

What does the research on collective intelligence say about teams?

A study of small groups found that performance across varied tasks was associated with members' average social sensitivity and a more equal distribution of conversational turns. It did not establish a universal formula for every organisation, or show that a preference survey causes better performance. It suggests that whose contribution gets heard can matter alongside what each person knows. Teams can use that observation to examine their own conversations.

How can work preferences help people collaborate?

Preferences offer a common language for describing how we tend to approach work. One person may want quiet time before a discussion; another may develop ideas through conversation. Sharing those preferences can prevent either person from guessing at the other's motives and help them agree on a way forward. A preference is neither an ability score nor an instruction. The benefit comes from the conversation and the choices people make together.