There Should Be An I In Team

To those of you who know me, it will come as no surprise that I neither liked nor did well in team sports growing up. So when I hear trite sports metaphors used in business meetings, my stomach churns. After all, if there is really no "I" in team, why do "I" risk getting fired if my numbers don't improve? This is especially true in places where performance is easy to measure, like consulting or sales.

This cliche is one end of a spectrum of mistakes that often plague people's thinking about work. Here, we are asked to pretend that we're all one big happy family, that we only function as a group. This is patently untrue. In almost every organization, people know the great performers and know that they get treated differently. On the opposite extreme, some prize individual performance above all else. These are the undeniably competent people who feel they carry the organization on their shoulders. They are not the long distance runner who gets where they are going by there own sheer willpower.

Bicycle racing provides a third model. While I often don't know who won the Super Bowl, I do follow the Tour de France. Briefly, bicycling is an individual sport which requires a team. What most casual observers don't understand is that however great Lance Armstrong was, his seven tour wins wouldn't have happened without a very strong team. At crucial moments, he came through. He won the time trials and he was the first to the summit. It was his team, however, who brought him to those moments. To oversimplify, anyone who has biked in the wind knows how much easier it is to ride behind someone else. If this is true on a leisurely Sunday ride, imagine how important it is when you're cruising at almost 30 m.p.h over one hundred miles a day for three weeks straight.

The point - no one else on the team was Armstrong - he is certainly an "I". Without him his team has done nothing this year. But he would have gone nowhere without his team. I think this can provide another way to think about star performance. We need to recognize that we have some people who are more valuable than others. But we also need to recognize that these people can't operate in a vacuum without a finely honed team behind them.

November 28, 2008 | Email Us

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