It's Not About Teamwork

“Teamwork” has become a marketing term of art, used to sell all kinds of snakeoil from books to training to workshops and consulting. Bolting on the latest ‘teamwork’ thinking is just ridiculously ineffective and misses the actual psychology behind the dynamics of impacting either individual performance or true team development. You also never see these people who push this business crack, defining the difference between what is a group of individuals and what is a real team. That difference is in how a ‘win’ is achieved. If an individual can achieve a ‘win’ on their own, then you don’t have a team but a group of people assigned a similar task or goal. If the group can only achieve a win or loss collectively, then you have a real team. Can a group of individuals engage in ‘teamwork’? Absolutely. But trying to overlay a team dynamic in order to achieve wins won’t work. It simply ignores the science.