Teamwork makes the machine work

During my junior year of college, I took a Software Engineering course where we built a reasonably straightforward yet significant piece of software: a virtual machine that runs an educational assembly language used in high schools and lower-level courses.

The VM assignment was a group project, which are notoriously good examples of the 80/20 rule (and notoriously accurate predictions for later group work in one's career). I decided to do everything I could to make the teamwork fair and enjoyable, and to my complete surprise, our teamwork ended up being fair and enjoyable.

Build Details

We built the VM in Python, using its vast array of available libraries for features we needed such as multithreading and a GUI. The machine reads an assembly-like bytecode called BasicML that represents what a simplified, academic assembly language might look like for high school courses.

Users can load existing programs, write new ones directly in the app, and save the current program to their local machine as a new file. The VM supports the older 4-digit word size for BasicML as well as the modern 6-digit word size (yes, the native word size is measured in digits, not bytes).

Dreamwork

From the very beginning, I participated enthusiastically in every team meeting and always came prepared when I was acting as Team Lead. I hoped the optimism would be contagious and would help frame this group project as something exciting that we would enjoy building together. I won't pretend that this was the only or even main reason why, but spirits were generally high throughout the semester and we had plenty of fun each week when we got together.

I kept teammates accountable for their contributions, and they in turn kept me accountable as well. I figured that frequent check-ins would prevent any dire procrastination and the peer pressure would help us do our best work. At the end of each sprint, we would show off the feature we had built, and the positivity and encouragement that followed was infectious. It relieved a lot of pressure knowing that the team was there to celebrate each member's wins.

How can I replicate this in my own workplace?

Not a damn clue.