What do you do if your Machine Learning team struggles with collaboration despite feedback?

1 Identify the root cause

The first step is to understand why your team is having difficulties collaborating. Is it a lack of trust, clarity, alignment, or respect? Is it a mismatch of skills, expectations, or incentives? Is it a personal or professional conflict? Try to diagnose the problem by observing the team dynamics, asking open-ended questions, and listening empathetically. Avoid blaming, judging, or dismissing anyone's views or feelings.

2 Set clear and shared goals

The next step is to ensure that your team has a clear and shared vision of what you are trying to achieve, why it matters, and how you will measure success. This can help align your team's efforts, priorities, and motivations. Use SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) criteria to define your goals and break them down into smaller and manageable tasks. Communicate your goals frequently and transparently, and invite feedback and input from your team members.

3 Establish norms and expectations

The third step is to establish norms and expectations for how your team will work together, communicate, and give and receive feedback. Norms are the unwritten rules and behaviors that shape your team culture and performance, while expectations are the explicit agreements and standards that guide your team roles and responsibilities. To co-create norms and expectations, it’s important to discuss topics such as the frequency of communication, how to document and share work, how to handle conflicts, disagreements, and mistakes, how to solicit, provide, and implement feedback, and how to celebrate successes and learn from failures.

4 Use effective feedback techniques

The fourth step is to employ effective feedback techniques to improve your team's collaboration and learning. Feedback is essential for machine learning teams, as it helps identify errors, optimize solutions, and generate insights. However, feedback can be challenging, as it can evoke emotions, defensiveness, or resistance. To give and receive feedback effectively, you can use the SBI (situation, behavior, impact), EEC (evidence, effect, change), COIN (context, observation, impact, next steps), and STAR (stop, think, act, reflect) models. For instance, the SBI model enables you to describe the specific situation and the observable behavior and the positive or negative impact of the behavior. The EEC model helps you provide evidence of your work and ask for suggestions for change. The COIN model facilitates feedback conversations by providing context for the feedback and agreeing on next steps. The STAR model allows you to stop and listen to the feedback before thinking about what it means and acting on it before reflecting on the outcome.

5 Foster a growth mindset

The fifth step is to foster a growth mindset among your team members. A growth mindset is the belief that you can improve your abilities and skills through effort, feedback, and learning. To cultivate a growth mindset, you should emphasize learning and recognize the process, not just the outcome. Feedback should be seen as an opportunity for improvement, not a threat. Additionally, modeling and sharing your own growth can help demonstrate how to apply learnings to work. This will help your team overcome challenges, embrace feedback, and collaborate effectively.

6 Review and improve

The final step is to review and improve your team's collaboration and feedback practices regularly. You can use various methods to monitor and evaluate your team's performance, such as surveys, interviews, metrics, or retrospectives. You can also use different tools to facilitate and enhance your team's collaboration and feedback, such as online platforms, dashboards, or chatbots. The key is to collect and analyze data, identify strengths and weaknesses, and implement changes based on your findings.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?