How CounterStrike helped me with teamwork in real lifeJuly 11, 2020

I am a software developer by profession, team work and collaboration is a crucial part of it, it is also a part which is really hard to learn. I also love playing counter strike (CS:GO), somewhere along the way I realized that playing CS:GO was causing a sub-concious change in me, I started to learn and improve from it. There are many lessons it taught me, in this post, we will focus on team work.

Before we begin

If you don't know what Counter Strike is, do take a look at this short but very helpful video:

This is a game where individually you can get better or worse, but at its heart, it is a team game. An individual may be able to win some rounds on their own, but you will win or lose the match as a team. On any given day, the team which plays better together will almost always win.

Team work makes the dream work!

Let us take a look at what makes a team and what makes the team work!

Team vs a Group of individuals

When you take a bunch of people and get them together, you can call them a team, but is it really a team?

CS:GO has two modes, casual and competitive, think of them as unranked (nothing to lose) vs ranked (something to gain, something to lose). Even if I play with the same bunch of people, the teamwork is absent in casual. The same set of people will work together in competitive mode, but be absolutely individualistic in casual.

It is easy to co-relate this and say that the incentive or impetus is necessary for the team work, but the more I played the more I realized, that is not the case. It is certainly a factor, but not the important one. it is more important for a team to have a "Shared Goal" that they believe in. You can call it a north star or a mission statement, but most importantly, a team must have something they agree on, believe in.

This allows individuals to still have their ambitions and targets, but a Shared Goal, allows it to come together harmoniously.

Why do we need a team though? What if I just got a bunch of brilliant people together?

A team that works together will punch above their weight. If you just have a bunch of people doing their own things, once in a while someone will come through and do something great, but more likely than not over a long enough period of time, the end result would be worse off.

People often get brilliant people together and hope they will work together, while they should be trying to get a bunch of people who work togther, are able to cultivate each other, they will become brilliant.

"If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together." — African Proverb

Importance of a good team culture

So far we have talked about what makes a good team, let us also look at the damage a bad team culture can cause. Do not underestimate the impact a bad team culture can have on an individual. At best it can create a stressful environment, which is never good, especially if the stress is never releived and things keep piling on.

However, in some extreme cases, the impact of a toxic team culture can be devastating. It can create self doubt. If the one facing the brunt is new to the career, a bad experience, can turn them off of the career choice!

In the first competitive match I played, I had a toxic team mate, I had no idea how to deal with him, I did not even know if that behavior was normal or not! I won that match, but I did not enjoy the experience. I started sticking to the casual mode. It took a nice person in casual to tell me what I faced was not normal. He encouraged me to give it a try again. Had it not been for him, I might not have played competitive mode again.

I felt like this in a video game. Imagine how a new comer to this industry would feel in real life! Wi`th that said, let us now look at how we can build a good team culture. Sadly, there is no silve bullet, but small things, which hopefully are easy for you to try.

Importance of familiarity

Some people like to keep their work and personal life separate, some are introverts, some are extroverts. There is a wide spectrum of personalities and builiding a team does indeed take time. However, just some small things can get the ball rolling and speed up the entire process.

In CS:GO, I almost always play with a random team (a.k.a. solo queueing), we would theoretically have a warmup time of 5 minutes before the match begins, but in reality, it would be far less. I realized I would have about 20 seconds, to get 4 other people I have never met with, will possibly never play again with, to be a team.

Through trials and tribulations, I realized the most important thing in this whole journey was to break the ice. Just a quick, friendly greeting goes a long way in relaxing people and getting the ball rolling. It breaks the inertia, it breeds familiarity, it makes one feel welcome!

Here are a few things you can do to welcome a new person:

  • Try to arrange a breakfast or anything informal with the team (or some people that the new person will have to interact with) soon after they join. Try to facilitate some light discussions if the silence is getting deafening.
  • or, have one person from the team/department, accompany this new person and just go around the office introducing people.

Just try to avoid dropping the person in a new place and leaving them alone.

If you are an introvert, or just horrible at breaking ice, here is a trick that worked for me, hopefully that may help you as well.

My previous employer had all white coffee cups, but we were allowed to bring our own as well. I chose a cup featuring deadpool. It was deep red, in a sea of white. It caught peoples eye and was a trigger for conversation, it was an area I am comfortable talking about. It was easy for others to start a conversation and for me to carry it out.

Accomodate for others failures and mistakes, including yours!

In counter strike, you tend to pick some positions you want to play, certain weapons that you want to master, certain areas where you are comfortable, certains areas you are not. This has strong parallels with Software development, with preferences for technology or the type of tasks.

Sometimes we can bite off more than we can chew, somedays our brain just doesn't work, or someone else might be having a better time/idea. Teams with hard set roles, which first seeks to assign blame over fixing things , will struggle.


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