There *is* an ‘I’ in Team

by The Crazy Colombian on February 22, 2007

in Life, Reflection

A team of indi­vid­u­als that all think the same way usu­ally does not achieve the level of ‘high-performing team’. This is dic­tated by Intel­lec­tual Dar­win­ism, which stip­u­lates that to have a rich intel­lec­tual envi­ron­ment, we need diver­sity of ideas, expe­ri­ence and skills.

But a team so diverse that its indi­vid­u­als have per­spec­tives, ideas and opin­ions with “too much diver­sity” can quickly become a group of peo­ple that can’t agree about any­thing. Such a group rarely becomes high-performing.

Com­mon wis­dom says that there is no I in Team. Yet real­ity says that a good team is one where there is a bal­ance between diver­sity in indi­vid­u­als , and the abil­ity to put the team’s inter­est and pur­pose ahead of indi­vid­ual pas­sions. In another words, we need to have many aligned I’s in a high-performing Team.

{ 0 comments… add one now }

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Previous post:

Next post: