Working in Multidisciplinary Teams Posted on May 2, 2006 Being considerate is a key issue when working in a team, states Wayne Drevets (bio).

I think working together in multi-disciplinary teams is essential to making progress, but it also can be demanding in terms of your needing to be considerate of your colleagues. One thing that’s important is to make sure that the team of experts you put together feels like they’re also benefiting from what you’re doing, so making sure that you reward them with co-authorships and also making sure that they get credit for ideas that they generate.

Those kinds of issues are just matters of being considerate, as one person to another, but they become vital in making sure that the collaborative relationship is one that’s synergistic and mutually beneficial, and I think that that is one of the key issues is being someone who is easy to work with, reasonable to work with, but also is not trying to grab all the glory and really trying to share the credit for what each person has contributed to that team.

I think another thing that becomes imperative for effective multi disciplinary research is that you, yourself, learn as much as you can about that other area; that you don’t just rely on an expert to give you all the advice because you will be a much more effective collaborator if you have learned some about that other discipline at least so that you can effectively link what you already know a lot about, your own area of expertise with theirs, and then you really supplement with the skills of that expert in the other discipline.

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