Not A Blog™

Teamwork has been on my mind, recently, due to the Baader-Meinhof effect. If there’s one thing I’ve noticed over the past few years, it’s that life takes themes. I’m not thinking about any particular topic when suddenly one pops up in four or five different places, followed shortly by rumination.

The most recent mention of teamwork was some guy who got fired for post a Dilbert strip ridiculing his bosses. I assume this happens on a regular basis, but this incident had been reported and I read about it. According to the article, he was about to be laid off anyway, so he obviously wasn’t concerned about losing his job over it, though he did anyway. More interesting was the reason management gave for his being fired. He wasn’t being a team player.

Let me be honest. I’ve been trying to figure out teamwork for about ten years, now. With traditional team sports growing up, most of what I heard was “stay out of the way and don’t screw anyone up”. Which was fine with me because the only time I played them was when I was forced to in school.

I was also forced to participate in what I consider to be the worst thing I’ve ever had to do in a classroom: group projects. Group projects are painfully predictable at being ineffective as learning tools. Either you do everything yourself, or you try to take charge at which point everyone complains that you’ve taken charge and are now ordering everyone around, or you end up doing nothing because nobody has taken charge and delegated any work to you, so then people complain that you slacked off and did nothing, not to mention the rest of the group is almost inevitably incompetent anyway. Why!?

On the other hand, the projects I get to do alone turn out exactly as good as I’m able to make them—or as good as I feel like making them which, after one takes into account in the procrastination factor, is often lower than it might otherwise have been.

As I was working through college, and following college, there was another reference to teamwork I kept encountering. Every job description I have ever read, ever, has had, as one of the prerequisites for holding the job, that the candidate be “a team player”.

It’s unfortunate this phrase has crept into the corporate lexicon because it’s not what managers are looking for most of the time. “Team player” can be a code phrase for a few different things, in addition to possibly looking for someone to integrate into a team.

When managers are looking for “team players”, they’re really just looking for people who get along with other people. There are no jobs where you don’t have to deal with people some time, and there are very few jobs where you can deal with people on your own terms. Diplomacy plays into it, and so every manager is looking for a candidate who at least appears to get along with everyone else most of the time. (Note that the job interview does not tell you this. That’s what the references are for.)

Unfortunately, the “team player” stipulation also sometimes means “yes-man” or “doesn’t question authority”. Those are not the same thing, but they fall under the same category, namely, not second-guessing the boss. For the applicant, there’s really no way to know if this is what the company is looking for until after you’ve already been moved into the position. In the case of the guy who got fired for posting the Dilbert comic, what he got fired for was undermining authority. Now, I don’t think it’s appropriate that he posted the comic, and I don’t think the company is overreacting by firing him. But the idea that he was fired for not being a team player is absurd. If nothing else, posting that comic is being more of a team player than those who just went along with management, because he was acting as the spokesperson for the team.

To get a non-bullshit picture of what a “team” is really about, we have to look at things accomplished by individuals and build up. It’s a cliché by now: the lone genius mind slaving away in the basement invents something that changes the very foundations of society. Let’s see, just off the top of my head: the telephone, light bulb, theory of gravity, theory of relativity, all-electrical television and video camera, calculus, the piano, and the modern stapler. These things were all largely, if not completely, the work of a single individual. Even if they weren’t working alone, as in the case of Thomas Edison, they weren’t really working on a team, either. Groups of two or three invented or discovered such things as radiation, the airplane, and the transistor. In the technical sense that any group larger than one is a team, these could be considered teams, also. But they don’t correspond to the sort of “team” we expect to encounter in a more structured workplace.

One thing that has always bothered me was that although so many wonderful, ground-breaking inventions were created by individuals, almost everyone still values the idea of a team higher than the idea of working alone. Even in cases where it’s demonstratively harmful or inefficient to use a team (as in many committees), the idea persists that working with other people will ultimately yield a better result. How is this justifiable when it so regularly fails?

The problem is that nobody knows what “team” means. I’m not talking about the dictionary definition. (That’s easy: a group of people working toward a common goal.) I’m talking about what it means—what the impact is, not only to those working together and the goal, but from the larger standpoint of planning and organization. What does a team mean? Many people simply assume it means just a group of people working together toward a common goal. Those people will never be able to figure out why they can assemble a “team” of people who are all “team players”, and yet accomplish nothing.

This is a well-understood phenomena in computer programming. It’s been demonstrated that adding programmers to a project that is behind schedule will make it fall further behind schedule. Part of the reason for this (not the only one) is that a big programming project is actually a whole lot of small programming problems to be solved, but this doesn’t automatically mean that it breaks down into equal-sized small puzzles which can be handed out to additional bodies as needed. In other words, the granular work of programming (problems to solve) doesn’t have a neat correspondence to the granular level of labor (individual programmers).

Taking all this into account, I think we can come up with a more useful definition of “team”. It’s not just a group of people working toward a common goal, but a group of people working toward a common goal, each of whom can do something that no one else on the team can. In the case where time is a factor, adding unskilled labor to handle mundane tasks can increase the rate at which the project advances, but like adding programmers, eventually you reach a point where the smallest unit of work and the smallest unit of labor don’t coincide. If time is not a factor, adding someone to a team who doesn’t increase the overall skillset of the entire team will not proportionately increase the amount of advancement the team makes on the project by “one body’s” worth, and neither will adding someone whose skill set is irrelevant.

[If I may go off on a little tangent here, it’s interesting to note that this is the United States Navy’s explanation for diversity in the force. As they say, each sailor brings unique pieces of their background to their job, and so that’s why it’s important to have diversity (all types: ethnic, religious, and presumably economic, too, although they don’t actually specify that one). This sounds great and all politically correct, but it’s in reality this justification is impotent. Most people join the military out of high school and so must be trained in the job they do. The military is continually evaluating which jobs are fully manned and which are short handed, and they funnel people where they’re needed (although not randomly).

The diversity in the military is not, itself, increasing the output of the team. They have the right idea in that the team is more effective when everyone brings something unique to the table. They are completely missing the point in that the things people bring to the table only increase the team’s effectiveness in a meaningful way if they are things the team is lacking. For the majority of jobs in the Navy, things like ethnic background and religious affiliation have absolutely no bearing on the skill required for the job being performed by the individual.]

I tend to do a lot of work on my own, but the instant I know there is something I need outside of my ability to do it myself, I get someone who I know can do it. According to corporate-speak, I’m not a team player because (among other reasons) I try to accomplish things myself before farming them out to the team. I see no reason to engage a team if the talents of the team mates is not needed.

But when you do need that other person, having them can have a huge positive impact on the quality of the final product. This is why two people can accomplish much more than one; and why three can do more than two, but why fifteen don’t do much more than fourteen, if they do more at all. With smaller numbers of people, the amount of novel, useful skill that each person brings to the team is a very large and measurable thing. On the other hand, adding that one extra person to a large group is not likely to add anything that the rest of the group can’t already accomplish between them.

Nobody puts out a job opening unless they have a position to fill. Saying that this person should be a “team player” is really saying that this person should get along with other people, because if they weren’t valuable in the specific skill they provide, getting them to play along with the rest of the team is moot. More nefarious is if the position being filled is one of eight identical positions. Then the company is not looking for a team player at all. They’re looking for someone who does what they’re told. The “team player” phrase only starts to apply when the person you’re hiring is doing a job that nobody else on the team can do.

But the problem I see isn’t that teamwork is bad or even misunderstood. The biggest complaint I have with regard to the whole team thing is that it is given inappropriate weight and consideration. Everyone wants people who can get along with each other. (Call that “being a team player” if you must.) Sometimes you’ll see a request for someone who is self-motivated or can work without supervision. But rarely is the value of an individual held in as high regard as the value of having a whole team of individuals—which is dangerous because the wrong team is so much worse than the wrong individual.

-Ted