According to my view, teams are several people working together
collectively within a defined and structured unit.
Teams can in no way be considered a panacea or assumed to always be a
positive construct- a change in structure is not much use without a change
in attitude- and I have seen many people take their functional mindset
with them into a team structure- with resulting reductions in overall
company performance.
The ease with which team members can find shared goals and values should
not be underestimated. This variety in opinions is a good thing- but
costly in terms of compromise and time and energy and negotiation to sort
out. As pointed out in my other email, this negotiation process may be
benefitial but it is also costly- too costly when a speedy response is
paramount.
For teams to work well, some commentators suggest that team members need
to be dependent on their colleagues, collective performance entails too
much opportunity for free riding on other people's efforts. For me,
dependence on other people is neither a good thing, nor a necessary thing.
Because of low entry barrier technologies like the Internet, we are seeing
the full realization of the "voluntary exchange principle" that no-one
need do anything they don't want to- so we only have to work with other
people (and vice versa) if we broadly agree with their mindset (although
not necessarily the ideas genereated by that mindset) or if it is valuable
for us to respond to their disagreement because this response sharpens our
own mind to our beliefs- as in this email! The later is mainly an
intellectual rather than operational matter- I will not change my opinion
because of your doubts and am not willing to compromise my core values so
that we can agree and work together in an organizational context. Perhaps
this precludes me from learning, but I am not going to learn for the sake
of it- I just want to retain truths.
Eugene was right to say that teamworking is necessary but teams are not.
The activity is necessary but should not be carried out within the
structure. I will be publishing "unorganization: the social and political
contexts" (along with "unorganization: a handbook for company
transformation" and "unorganization: a handbook for individual
transformation") on unorg.com in the next couple of weeks which will cover
this mindset in more detail: we are moving from organized to unorganized,
from static to dynamic, from interactions to interventions, from
collective to individual, and so on.
Regards, sincerely simon buckingham, www.unorg.com, buck@dial.pipex.com
unorganization: business not busyness!
> Replying to LO15244 --
>
> I was quite suprised by your skeptism and description of the
> characteristics of teams. In my experience teams have none of these
> characteristics, so perhaps the word teams we share are pointing to
> different realities. Could you describe what you mean by that word?
>
> jon <jon_jenkins_imaginal_training@pi.net>
--Simon Buckingham <go57@dial.pipex.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>