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Are you tired of hearing the excuse, "I was assigned to a bad team?" when teams fail to function as planned? It's the most common excuse for non-performance I hear from highly skilled professionals. I cringe when I hear it. In my experience, no team is "bad" unless each member gives up and consciously decides the team is unsuccessful. For this and plenty of other reasons, I conclude that teamwork should not be promoted as a group skill, but rather as an individual skill and responsibility of everyone in the workplace.
Why? Because teamwork is the primary means forgetting one's work done in a highly interdependent and changing environment. Treating teamwork as a group skill and responsibility rather than an individual one allows highly skilled employees to account for their non-performance by pointing fingers at others. This is an especially critical issue for highly capable professionals who seek to remain employed in environments of accelerating change.
To make my case, it is important to make distinctions between behavior in hierarchies and in teams. Teaming is one of three archetypal organizing mechanisms for getting work done. The others are
1) hierarchy and 2) exchange between a buyer and seller. However, the mind-set and behaviors for successfully participating in teams are not nearly as widespread and culturally developed in the workplace as are the mindset and behaviors for working in a hierarchy or for conducting transactions. Certainly one reason is that hierarchy and buyer/seller transactions have each been the subject of study and practice for centuries, some say for millennia. By contrast, teamwork has only a decades-long history of study and practice in the workplace. Read on for contrasts between hierarchy and teams in terms of getting work done.
Hierarchy and teams
Change consultants and their clients promote and build teams both as a means for achieving change as well as accomplishing work in changing environments. Because of their integrative nature, we hold that teams are more flexible, innovative, permeable, responsive, and adaptive than hierarchies. Teams also engender greater commitment from members who develop a sense of purpose and ownership by having a voice in what does and doesn't get done.
Teaming can be tough to incorporate and maintain, especially since teams are not necessarily permanent. And...