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A Slight Semantic Adjustment In How We Talk About “Teamwork”
Interesting article on Harvard Business Review right now. Follow the bouncing ball here:
1. As a species, humans weren’t big enough or scary enough to survive pre-historic times without banding together in groups. Hence, from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re hard-wired to basically want to work together with others.
2. The social connectivity thing is so valuable that when those bonds are frayed, it’s like a physical hit. In other words, you can get dumped, take an Aspirin, and feel better. Honestly.
3. When you think about how important socially connecting to others is, you would thus initially assume that workplaces are really effective — after all, most white-collar work in the modern era is done in teams, and a lot of blue-collar work is as well. But yet, teams aren’t that effective — and neither are managers, generally — so that begs the question: Why?
4. Here’s one potential reason: “teams” often equates to more and more meetings of a group of individuals, but the actual work you do (after those meetings) is individual, and not in a team. Think about it: in college, if you had a group assignment due, chances are you all met and discussed it — then you assigned individual…
