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Micro Habits for better Teamwork

Psychological Hacks with Great Impact

This book is 98% completeLast updated on 2026-05-14
Dr. Denniz Dönmez & Dr. Rafael Huber

Good teamwork is a skill. Like any skill, it can be learned — through small, deliberate practice, repeated often enough to become second nature.

Micro Habits for Better Teamwork is the practical guide teams have been missing: grounded in psychology, built for everyday use, and designed to make a real difference from day one.

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About

About

About the Book

Most team problems aren't technical. They're communicative. A question misread. An assumption never voiced. A conflict that could have been resolved in thirty seconds — but wasn't, because no one knew how.

Micro Habits for Better Teamwork is a field guide for anyone who has ever sat in a meeting and thought: this could be so much better. Drawing on psychology, organizational research, and years of hands-on work with teams across industries, authors Denniz Dönmez and Rafael Huber have distilled the science of great collaboration into something refreshingly practical: small, learnable language habits that compound over time into a genuinely better team culture.

Organized around seven behavioral areas with concrete examples, ready-to-use phrases, and team experiments, the book is both a guide and a toolkit — readable cover to cover, or dipped into chapter by chapter as your situation demands.

Because the biggest changes in how teams work together often begin with the smallest shifts in how they talk to each other.

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LeadershipTeamworkOrganizational Psychology

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Author

About the Author

Dr. Denniz Dönmez & Dr. Rafael Huber

Denniz is an organizational developer who supports companies and leadership teams with his multifaceted expertise. He holds a degree in engineering (Technical University of Munich) and economics (London School of Economics). Since completing his doctorate in organizational psychology (ETH Zurich), he has helped numerous organizations establish structures that enable high performance — from start-ups to large corporations, NGOs, and theater companies. Denniz has implemented major transformation projects and established new understandings of leadership in many organizations. His experience from international projects in diverse industries confirms that interdisciplinary teams succeed when they have the right structural conditions. He has worked in Germany, the UK, Spain, Tanzania, Israel, and Japan, among other places. Since 2010 he has been living in Zurich with his wife and two children, and alongside his work in organizations, he has been a lecturer at numerous universities, including ETH, FHNW, ZHAW, the University of Zurich, and many others. He is also regularly giving keynotes, and has been invited to diverse companies from startups to Google.

More at: www.enablingstructures.com

Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

How to Read This Book

Part I: The Psychology of Small Recipes with Great Impact

1 What Are Micro Habits for Better Teamwork?

2 Dysfunctional Teams

3 Highly Functional Teams

  1. Good Teams Are Reflective Teams

4 Why Many Teams Do Not Become Highly Functional on Their Own

  1. Puzzle Instead of Poker!
  2. Why Playing Poker Does Not Work
  3. Why Teams Need Professional Help with Conflicts

5 Small Recipes with Major Impact

Part II: Micro Habits for Better Teamwork

  1. Seven Areas in Which Micro Habits Make a Difference

1 Curiosity and Compassion

  1. Context Shapes Communication
  2. The “You Idiot Test”: A Practical Tool
  3. Micro Habits for Curiosity and Compassion

2 Transparency and Clarity

  1. Ambiguity Breeds Misunderstanding
  2. Micro Habits for Transparency and Clarity

3 Psychological Safety

  1. Learning Is the Superpower of Successful Teams
  2. Four Stages of Psychological Safety
  3. Micro Habits for Psychological Safety

4 Needs Before Solutions

  1. The Dilemma of Unspoken Expectations
  2. The Problem Behind the Problem: How Misunderstandings Arise
  3. A Story of Two Teams
  4. Change and Resistance — When Inner Balance Wavers
  5. Conflicts Come in Different Styles
  6. Micro Habits for Clarifying Needs Before Solutions

5 Testing Assumptions

  1. A Ladder to the World Inside Our Own Heads
  2. How Explicit Assumptions Help Us Avoid Misunderstandings
  3. Micro Habits for Testing Assumptions

6 Kindhearted Honesty

  1. Feedback — Two Different Ways of Understanding It
  2. Honesty Is Not the Opposite of Empathy
  3. The “Shit Sandwich”: A Classic Feedback Fauxpas
  4. Micro Habits for Candid Honesty

7 Taking Ownership of Your Own Decisions

  1. Taking Responsibility: From Victim to Self-Determination
  2. Why Taking Responsibility Is So Hard
  3. Why Does This Help with Responsibility?
  4. Ownership as Team Culture
  5. Micro Habits for Owning our Decisions

1 How We Can Develop Robust Habits?

  1. Small Habits Only Have Impact Through Sustained Application
  2. Repetition Creates Automaticity

2 How Micro Habits Become Part of Everyday Life

  1. The Micro Habits Journey — A Learning Journey in Seven Steps
  2. Regular Reminders
  3. Practical Tips

Epilogue

Bibliography

Image Credits

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Acknowledgments

What Others Say About Micro Habits for better Teamwork®

About the Authors

  1. Dr. Denniz Dönmez
  2. Dr. Rafael Huber

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