Talk: Is your team clicking? Or cliquey?

Talk description

Title:	Is your team clicking? Or cliquey?
Short synopsis:	Ever brought people together who don’t quite ‘click’? Been working in a happy team when divides begin to form? Everyone has deeply ingrained habits, skills, and feelings, as a result of past experience. Put us all together and we’ll attract (and repel) in different ways. Let’s explore why cliques and subgroups form, with some help from Bourdieu’s ‘Forms of Capital’. We’ll look at ways we can neutralise the negatives, bridge the gaps and pull people back together again. Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):	Clique [noun] - definition: ‘a small group of people who spend their time together and do not welcome other people into that group’. In this 90 minute workshop we’ll first work with attendees to identify and explore awareness of subgroups (healthy) and cliques (unhealthy) and understand the differences, using their own past contexts. We’ll look at how these definitions can be fluid over time and facilitate discussion of what we might monitor to identify movement between the two extremes. We will introduce the basics of Pierre Bourdieu’s Forms of Capital to help teams understand influences on these behaviours and realise that they are perfectly natural, based on our cultural and social differences. In fact, more than just natural, they are an essential part of team diversity! Having helped teams identify the forms of capital at play in their examples, we will share the findings of a University of Portsmouth study which looked at how cliques and subgroups affected the performance of a Rugby Union team over the course of a season. The study opens by explaining: “the presence of subgroups and cliques has historically been associated with issues of exclusivity, ostracism, conflict, lack of cohesion, stress, and decreased probability of success”. To many of us working with software development teams these effects can seem familiar and we will ask participants to think about whether being able to recognise and understand the patterns at play might help their own teams work better with each other. The study ultimately proposes that “subgroups should be monitored, cliques should be managed”. Can we, in software, use this technique to neutralise cliques or move them back to being healthy subgroups, maximising the success of our teams and products? Max size: 5000 chars
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