Individual vs. Collective | Reflection #3

Team = Collection of Individuals

Individuals are still individuals, even if those individuals comprise a team. I find the notion of succeeding or failing as a team to be rather intense. Although implications aren't explicit, it would appear that team successes and failures occur w.r.t. the entire team's involvement. Rarely has this been the case in my experience.  Usually, there are a couple of champions in what I like to call the champion led model (CLM). That is, if a team can be classified as a CLM, there will be relatively few persons on said team who are both competent and motivated to the success of the team's goal(s). These champions usually do the majority of the work while others drift along contributing moderately or even marginally.

Of course, champion is a relative descriptor; if everyone contributed at the same level (or even at approximately the same level), there might be a better sense of contribution equity? Might then the team better reflect that which it claims to be: a team? Then again, a team is more than just a group of individuals giving it their best at their individual tasks. These individuals need to communicate with one another to avoid, among other things, duplicating work. For simplicity's sake, let's just consider individual communications with the team a subset of individual contributions to the team.

I mentioned that succeeding or failing as a team seems a fairly intense notion. The intensity to which I am referring appears to be founded on a relationship between individual goals and team goals. Based on the team goal, one person may be highly motivated to contribute to the team... and another, not so much.

A simple military example might look like a squad of soldiers sneaking quietly through jungle terrain in an effort to get out of a hot zone. Each soldier is highly motivated to contribute to the success of the team's end-goal: stay alive. That's because the team's end-goal is also each individual's end-goal! So, it would seem (naively) that if E is an equals relationship, E(individual goal, team goal) may give us some insight as to the motivation and thus contribution levels of a given team member.

We might also have said that the individual goal was to stay alive and that the team goal was to get out of the hot zone. The relationship would then be defined a little differently. Here's an example illustrating this relationship. I mentioned in a previous post that I was part of a mobile development team where each individual was highly motivated to succeed. I am almost certain that the following goal was owned by each member: put something cool on my résumé. The team's collective goal was of course to make something cool. The team's goal here was a means to an end for the individual goal. We might call this a dependent relationship between goals, or D. Although E is a fairly interesting relationship when considering goals, so is D. I am not sure which one is more powerful/useful.

...actually, upon further thinking, I am not sure that the Internet itself could hold all that might be said here! I suppose then that my reflections in this post aren't quite that robust. Nevertheless, I still believe this stuff is important, and I am prepared to reap what criticism may come my way. Besides, the idea of never going out on a limb kind of bothers me... and leads to life in a very small box.