Why is a Strong Team Important?
As I said at the beginning of this essay series, I’ve been on a few very good teams and a few very bad teams and a lot of teams that are in between. However, not all of the good teams I’ve been on were always successful, and at times the worse teams could produce wonderful results. So if a bad team can be successful and a good team can fail, why not just figure out how to produce successful results fast and/or repetitively? The answer has to dimensions: short-term practical and long-term ecological.
I don’t think I need to go into detail here on the short-term, practical reasons for having a strong team. We all want better results, and a good team typically gets us there faster with less stress. If you’re reading this, you have the specific reasons you want to build a good team and this is another widely-covered topic you can dive into elsewhere. There’s an interesting paper here: https://www.cairn.info/revue-management-2012-3-page-284.htm# and a good starter here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/the-importance-of-teamwork with some further references.
The long-term ecological dimension is less easily measured, but assumes that a person's experience on a team has a broader impact in their life and the lives of those around them than the raw measurement of succeeding or failing.
Let's start with little math. There are 168 hours in the week. Let’s assume we sleep, on average, 8 hours per night including time getting ready for bed and stumbling around semi-conscious and sleep-deprived in the morning. That breaks down to 56 hours per week where we're basically unconscious and 112 hours that we're awake. Most of us spend (at the very least) 40 hours per week working. This math works out to over 35% of our conscious adult life spent at work, and most of us work on teams. And while we have a lot of choice in our social groups and romantic partners, we have quite limited choice in who we work with. Even entrepreneurs, who hire people for their own companies, are limited by their ability to pay people and by who's available on the job market.
This begs the question: how do you want to spend 35% of your adult life? Think of what it's like for someone who cares about their work, feels good about the people they’re working with, wants to go to work most days, who strives to do better for themselves and for the other people they work with, who understand that the team’s success is a vehicle for--and amplifies--their own success. Having such an experience bleeds into other areas of a persons life. There is a cascade of benefits for someone works on a strong team. Some people will say that this type of experience is because of a personality type or it's mostly luck and there are situations where these statements may be true, but it does not need to be left to chance. These experiences can be crafted, but they take time and consistency.
The real answer to the question posed by this section title is that building a strong, resilient team creates the possibility of moving the world in a good direction by crafting strong, resilient people who work together towards valuable goals. People who have participated been on a truly strong team will, on the whole, be more effective in their own lives, will have a stronger grounding in reality, will understand experientially what it takes to get things done in the world, will have a deeper sense of self-esteem and self-worth which will, in turn, improve many aspects of their own life as well as positively influence the lives of those around them. Such people are willing to work and collaborate with others--including people with differing values and perspectives--and will have a great capacity to create positive value in the world. And to truly change the world, we need strong teams because the great challenges that face us in the world today will take great collaboration and teamwork to overcome and we must learn how to work together better and to do our jobs in concert with other people.
A more succinct answer to the question posed by the title of this post might be the following: It's important to have a good team because:
- You'll be more successful in your short- and long-term endeavors
- You and everyone on your team will have better practical skills in everything they do
- Ultimately, it's a strong path to make the world better for everyone in it
But enough of this heady stuff. In the next few posts I'll look at the tangible indicators of strong and weak teams and the conditions that build and temper strong teams.