Why teamwork ultimately fails....

I recently became a daddy and thus the long hiatus in my posts.

Today I'll explain to you why teamwork hardly ever works and when it does appear to work it only does for a very limited time.  The kind of individuals who preach the "teamwork" mantra are often managers.  Project managers, head coaches of professional sports, CEOs and the list goes on.  Why do leaders need their followers drinking the Kool-Aid?  The secret is leaders hate competition.  In other words, the thing that leaders hate the most is another potential leader because there can only be one leader.

I'd like to go off on a tangent for a second here.  How many resumes can one read without reading the skill set "I have leadership skills."  I call bullshit on all that.  There cannot be that many leaders leading people on projects because then there would be no followers left.  The truth is there are only a handful of people in ten-thousand that can truly lead.  And it's not because they are masters of the whip or skillful manipulators of language.  This rare bird can be called a real leader because people want to follow them.  People follow them because they can first lead by example and then have the eloquence and charisma to communicate their actions to the everyman.

With that corollary in mind, most anyone who claims they are some kind of leader or manager cannot keep a following without having their disciples buy into this religion called "teamwork."  After all, a leader cannot call himself a leader if the group he leads cannot stay together.  If they cannot stay together willfully, an artificial construct must be created for the members to believe that staying together, even though they individually would rather not, is a moral good.  Once a moral good has been established, each person becomes emotionally invested.  Now the "leader" has what they want - a following.

Teamwork ultimately fails because it only takes one person in the group to stop buying into the moral good of "shared success and shared failure" and decides to individually benefit from the "shared success" but then socialize the shared losses, it is only a matter of time before other members follow suit until there are no more successes and only failures.  That one person is typically leader himself but it can be an existing team member that is secretly trying to take credit for other people's work.

Sooner or later someone is looking for another job or move on to another team where the individual benefits are better.  In other words the truth ultimately comes out - "You gotta do what's best for you."

How many times have you heard that line?  Either an employee leaves the office or team and you hear it or you turn on the radio and the star running-back of your favorite team moves on to a division rival and you hear the head-coach saying that line in a press conference?

Typically it's the leaders that screw everything up because they are the ones who benefit from the teamwork construct.  They rely on the construct so that they can take credit for the team's work.  After all, no one person ON the team can take credit for anything.  It's a team effort.  The leader takes the credit because the leader organized and motivated the team to meet some goal.  And while that's not nothing, if the leader cannot acknowledge the individual efforts, it undermines the construct and it is only a matter of time before someone leaves because "it's just time to move on."

It would be much better for a supposed leader to just embrace the truth and admit there is no such thing as teamwork and that while it is expected that individuals work together to achieve a goal, extra individual effort to reach the goal will yield extra rewards.  If someone on a team decides to slack off, another team member can pick up the extra slack.  Why would they do this?  Because in the new environment, the harder working individuals will be motivated to document all the extra work they've been doing because of how individual productivity is incentivized.  The more productive people will begin to collaborate better because no individual wants to perform the same work that someone else did and thus waste their time.

The bottom line is, you don't need to preach teamwork when you have a group of productive individuals.  Teamwork is the Bible the lazy and unproductive people keep thumping.