Technical challenges are also human challenges
Technical organizations invest heavily in expertise, tools, processes, and methodologies, yet many difficulties arise not from the technology but still from interactions between people. We have all experienced how stimulating and engaging teamwork can be when collaboration flows across different backgrounds and levels of experience. We can also recognize the influence of those who inspired us, shared their experience, and helped us grow technically or personally. Moreover, human dynamics start with ourselves: our judgments and emotions influence our decisions and directly impact our teams. How can greater awareness of these dynamics help us build effective teamwork, make better decisions and, more importantly, achieve a better overall balance in our lives?
Collaboration — Expertise does not automatically create a team
Our technical teams combine different disciplines, cultures, generations, and professional experiences. The key is to make sure that communication between team members flows well. With each difference, assumptions can be made and, over time, these can negatively impact teamwork. We therefore have a responsibility to clarify our own messages and ask for clarification from others, reducing misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions.
Strong expertise can also make us more attached to our own interpretations and ways of thinking. The time and effort invested in reaching a certain level of expertise can shape our thinking and gradually create a comfort zone to which we can become attached, making us, in some ways, vulnerable as less open to being challenged.
Let’s keep in mind that collaboration requires curiosity about how another person reached a different conclusion. At the same time, let’s encourage others to be curious about our own work and reasoning.
Clarifying messages, asking questions, remaining open to challenge, and cultivating curiosity across a team all require psychological safety. People need to know that they can question, disagree, and also agree without fear. This is not an obvious team culture to build, and there is no magical, one-size-fits-all solution; each team needs to find its own way. Good collaboration is not the absence of disagreement. It is the ability to use disagreement constructively to move forward together as a team.
'Good collaboration is not the absence of disagreement. It is the ability to use disagreement constructively..'
Generational transitions — Transferring more than technical knowledge
As we gain experience, we are increasingly likely to work alongside younger generations. As experienced professionals, we obviously carry valuable technical knowledge, but also tacit knowledge built over time: intuition, lessons learned from failures, and an understanding of context.
Younger colleagues bring new technologies, different working habits, and a willingness to challenge established practices and build differently. Difficulties may arise when knowledge transfer becomes one-directional. Effective transition, just like effective communication, requires reciprocal learning. It is interesting to consider how we can share the experience built over time while continuing to learn from new perspectives.
Younger generations may also bring different expectations regarding well-being and work-life balance. Rather than judging these expectations against the standards under which previous generations built their careers, we can remain curious about what they may teach us.
This also means remaining open to change and to being challenged. Rather than simply observing technical and organizational evolution, we can choose to be part of it, combining experience with new ways of thinking and fostering greater synergy, collaboration, and cooperation across generations.
'Effective transition, just like effective communication, requires reciprocal learning.'
Judgment and emotions — The invisible layer of technical decisions
Technical professionals often like to think that decisions are primarily rational and evidence-based. Yet our emotions inevitably influence how we interpret situations and make decisions. Sometimes, we may even build a rational explanation around a decision already strongly influenced by how we feel.
Rather than trying to exclude emotions from technical teamwork, we can learn to recognize and use the information they provide. Identifying frustration early, for example, can help us understand what matters to a colleague and which value or need may be at stake. Before frustration develops into anger, it can become an opportunity for dialogue, helping a team understand what needs to change and potentially establish new rules together.
Teams should also be attentive to emotions such as contempt, which can foster power plays, uneasiness, and tensions. Fear of being wrong may prevent someone from challenging a colleague; frustration may make disagreement unnecessarily confrontational; attachment to our own solution may reinforce confirmation bias; and while confidence helps a team move forward, excessive confidence can reduce questioning and the motivation to explore new possibilities.
Recognising these dynamics within ourselves and our teams requires awareness and courage. Let’s have the courage to do it.
'In increasingly complex technical environments, the strongest teams may not simply be those with the greatest expertise, but those that know how to combine expertise with an awareness of the human dynamics through which that expertise is expressed.'
Human skills as part of technical excellence
Generational transition, collaboration, judgment, and emotions are not peripheral “soft” issues. They influence whether knowledge circulates, whether different perspectives are heard, and ultimately whether teams make robust decisions and create forward-looking ideas and solutions.
In increasingly complex technical environments, the strongest teams may not simply be those with the greatest expertise, but those that know how to combine expertise with an awareness of the human dynamics through which that expertise is expressed.
At a time when AI can provide answers to almost any question we may have, our ability to question becomes even more valuable.
We can sharpen the way we interrogate information, challenge our own assumptions, and cultivate curiosity. Perhaps the differentiating skill is no longer only knowing the answer, but knowing what to question and which questions are worth asking.
Let’s have the courage to work on these dynamics, not only to perform better together, but also to enjoy our professional and personal lives more fully.
'Perhaps the differentiating skill is no longer only knowing the answer, but knowing what to question and which questions are worth asking.'
Gwenola Michaud is consultant at Geosciences Monitoring Consulting (GMC).
Views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.
