Forget What You Learned In Gradeschool About Teamwork

Had a ses­sion with a group the other week that were adamant about how team­work is very impor­tant for their group. They said that they have worked in com­pa­nies where team­work is not as impor­tant as get­ting the job done, and they were miserable.

Here’s some­thing from BNET about team­work. Read and learn.

By Jeff Palfini
http://​blogs​.bnet​.com/​t​e​a​m​w​o​r​k​/​?​p​=​1​0​3​&​a​m​p​;​t​a​g​=​n​l​.​e​713

Since we were all knee-high to a white­board, we’ve been told that we need to work well as part of a team, that the team trumps the indi­vid­ual, that every leader is only as good as his team. Team team team team team. Who didn’t ride the pine in Lit­tle League so every­one could get a few min­utes of play­ing time?

But now that we’re adults, cyn­ics — many of us full-blown skep­tics — can we really believe that this idea of team is the holy grail of pro­duc­tiv­ity and suc­cess? Any­one whose days are spent try­ing to squeeze in work between all of their meet­ings can tell you that team unity can some­times be coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. And it seems that the only peo­ple who get any­thing out of you and your office­mates catch­ing a backward-falling coworker is the con­sult­ing com­pany that charged $5,000 to show you how to do it.

So just as we adults have learned that you can, in fact, drink too much milk or water, we also must ques­tion the grade-school wis­dom we’ve always assumed to be true about teamwork.

Top Five Myths of Team­work

1. Teams are always good. Man­agers con­fronted with a new task should always con­sider whether pulling together a team will be the most effi­cient way to com­plete the task. Some­times it’s faster and less com­pli­cated to par­cel it out or del­e­gate it to one or two peo­ple, espe­cially if the task is fairly routine.

2. Teams should come to a con­sen­sus. Time spent try­ing to reach con­sen­sus on deci­sions could be bet­ter spent act­ing on the deci­sions, as Jon Katzen­bach dis­cusses in his book “Teams at the Top.” More often than not, the team mem­bers who pos­sess the knowl­edge to make an informed deci­sion should do so individually.

3. There’s no “I” in team. This old chest­nut gets trot­ted out any­time a man­ager doesn’t want to con­sider the needs of indi­vid­u­als within the team. But keep­ing the indi­vid­ual mem­bers of the team happy, invested in the task, and excited about their job is the only way a team can be effec­tive. They need to know you have their long-term devel­op­ment in mind too, not just the goals of the team.

4. You must get along with your team­mates. Rod­ney King’s famous rhetor­i­cal ques­tion (”Why can’t we all just get along?”) was just that. Some­times your team mem­bers’ per­son­al­i­ties just don’t mesh, and this isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing. Con­flict actu­ally helps a team stay inno­v­a­tive. Your team mem­bers need to respect each other and their respec­tive roles, and fol­low the team’s gen­eral code of behav­ior; they don’t have to go out for pints or stand as god­par­ent for each other’s kids.

5. The more the mer­rier. Though it seems like adding another pair of eyes, ears, and typ­ing hands to a project is always a pos­i­tive, teams lose some of their effec­tive­ness when they expand past 12 to 15 mem­bers. The larger a team gets, the harder it is to keep mem­bers invested, informed, on task, and on the same page.