The Nature of Teams

Teams are highly overrated. Sports teams like football and basketball are fine. Let me define what a team is: A team is a group of people cooperating to accomplish a main goal or to create a product. Creating a product by one person is optimal if time is not a factor. Poets, song-writers, novelists and any other artist or craftsperson can spend as much time on a product as (s)he wants. Yes, there are pressures from the publicist or record company to get a song done within a dead line but it is not really the same thing. The artist still has complete control of the product. Teams creating a product have shared control of the product. If time is a factor in creating the product then you got to start using teams.

There are several issues with teams. One is communication of ideas. When a team is making a product, people in the team will want to share their ideas. Some ideas are better than others. Some ideas might be misinterpreted or are just unclear. Some people in the group may not have any suggestions. Either because they just don't have any, or they are scared their suggestions will be ridiculed, or maybe they just don't care. The more people in the team the more this phenomena increases. Because of possible communication breakdown, the more people in the team the longer it will take to get the goal accomplished. It's an inverse relation between member count and time taken to meet the goal. You have to get the right number of members for efficiency. That is a tricky calculation. My guesstimate is no more than ten people in a team. Not only do you want the right number of people in a team, but you want to take into account personality and/or egos. Members personalities might clash. For instance, you might have a dramatic person who overwhelms a sensitive or a solitary person. Also, the individual members might defend their ideas on the product too much and reject other ideas that are not his/her too quickly. Then you have too controlling members who want to do everything in the group and leave the other members hardly doing anything. Then you have the team leader. The team leader should be someone who treats members fairly and is able to get the team motivated to complete the product efficiently and timely.

A team functions best when every member of the team is treated fairly and cares about accomplishing the goal. Every member should have a say in how the goal is met. This is up to the team leader to make sure everyone has a chance to state their opinion. The individual ideas should not be ridiculed but the member should be able to defend or explain his idea or suggestion. Personal attacks should definitely not be allowed by the team leader. If every member feels that they are part of the solution or are valued then the group will function more cohesively and effectively. Every member has to be held responsible for their actions and inactions. If everyone is held accountable and allowed to express opinions especially one's viewed as unfavorable to the goal then group think should not
happen. It is up to the team leader to see this does not happen.