The Tea on Teamwork: Week One of My i.c.stars Tech Internship

I went into my first week at i.c.stars thinking about technology, code, and systems. The week turned out to be about the human layer instead, and the most useful thing I learned was about myself: when a project gets hard and progress feels slow, I take on more work instead of asking for help. While Team Week was very involved and we spent a lot of time learning about our team dynamic and reflecting on it, I feel like I genuinely got to know my teammates and their approaches to teamwork and collaboration. I realized going into the program that I am a very collaborative person and tend to value my interpersonal relationships more than the task at hand. Still, some of the self-assessment tools we used really highlighted that blind spot. In many situations taking on more work is a positive attribute. In a team setup it is a major weakness. Rethinking True Collaboration We ran through a few workshops during the week that really spoke to me on this topic. One of them was a consulting agency case study. My partner drew a scenario where he was the more experienced colleague doing all the work, because his coworker was resistant to change. The natural impulse there is to take over and do the work for the person who is not prepared. But in reality, collaboration means setting the expectations, making a plan, and providing the tools for the teammate to bring themselves up to speed. The Mathematics of Trust We also had a discussion about trust that came with actual math. Trust is a broad concept, but it comes down to four things. Your credibility, your reliability, and your intimacy, which is the willingness to make other people feel safe with you. Those three stack on top. Underneath all of them sits self-orientation, which is how much of this is really about you. The single best piece of advice I got that week was that everything above the line is irrelevant if what is below it is not genuine. In other words, if your primary goal is to get things done by any means necessary, it will come across, and no amount of effort will convince people otherwise that you are trustworthy. Tackling the Unknowns We also spent about twenty minutes on the fundamentals of technology transformation: cybersecurity, data analytics, and AI. Twenty minutes is nowhere near enough to learn any of that, which was the point. The workshop was not about the tech. It was about how you handle information you do not have yet. When trying to absorb a lot of information about a particular topic, it is easy to get overwhelmed and attempt to consume everything at once. Still, realistically, it is better to focus on the knowns and the unknowns, then tackle the unknowns one at a time. Looking Ahead to Week Two I also picked up a role this week: tea documentarian. That needs some context if you have not been through this program. High Tea is a daily afternoon session where a business or technology executive sits down with the cohort. They walk through how they actually got where they are, what they are wrestling with right now, and a book that shaped them, and then the floor opens for questions. It is the part of the program that puts nontraditional candidates in a room with people whose calendars are usually closed to us. My job is to track who comes through and what each visit does for the cycle. We have not had one yet, so I am writing this before I know what I am in for. It is going to test the exact thing I just admitted is my weak spot, because documenting it well means paying attention to everyone else in the room instead of quietly grinding on my own work. The first week has been exciting and busy, and it has already given me more to think about on the human layer of this program than I expected. I am really looking forward to seeing what else week two has in store. If you have been the teammate who quietly takes on more work instead of asking for help, what actually got you to stop? I am asking selfishly. Week two goes up next Friday.