Teams

I remember back in my undergrad days at LeTourneau frequently hearing from the head of the engineering department how employers today were looking for people who could work on teams and that teamwork was a norm in the workplace. He would cite the engineering advisory board that the school had assembled as his source. The advisory board was a collection of people who, for various reasons, were supposed to have their hand on the pulse of the engineering workforce. Their role was to advise the faculty in such a way as to keep the engineering program at LeTourneau relevant.

While in school, working in a team was rarely a good thing as far as I was concerned because I always felt like the act of coordinating, organizing, delegating, and the like was overhead effort; I often felt like it would be easier to just do everything myself. (This kind of gets at the "mythical man month" idea where some business managers assume that effort from any employee is interchangeable with effort from any other employee and to get something done faster you can simply add more people. In reality, adding more people introduces more overhead and coordination costs that may not pay-off in the long run.) I always wondered just where these advisory board members worked and what kind of teams they worked on. If there teams were anything like ours at school, it was a miracle that anything useful got done.

As I've pondered this over the years and worked for two very different manufacturers in industry , I've come to the conclusion that I think there was a hidden communication breakdown between the advisory board and the LeTourneau faculty. I think the root of the breakdown comes in the multiple definitions or styles of teams. Here's how I see things, making up the terms and definitions as I go along.

Independent teams: These are teams where very little interaction is required between team members and the final result of their effort is the sum of their cummulative effort. There is no synergy, no interaction effects, just a bunch of solo efforts combined. Using sports analogies, these are the wrestling, track and gymnastic teams. Everybody does their own thing and the output of the team is sum of each individual players efforts. Some might say that this is hardly a team at all and there is clearly a good case to be made for this point. Regardless, the word "team" is used in these situations and not just in the athletic world. They are some form of team.

Co-operative teams: Co-operative teams have significant independent responsibilities as well as a role in a larger whole; an example would be a basketball team. The fitness and skill of each player is required and there is definitely a huge positive effect of having superstar members but no superstar could single-handedly win on his or her own. The team must coordinate their efforts, plan and work together to achieve their goal, and often must execute in a manner that is both aware and dependent on others. There is still high value in the skills of the invidiuals though. Basketball teams need their specialists, their three point shooters or the big guy down low to get the rebounds and everybody on the team needs to be making their free throws. There are always superstars that seem to be able to do it all but even they can't win the whole game on their own. They excel but not without other (admittedly less skilled) players doing their part. Michael Jordan would win hardly any games if he was the only players on the team and wouldn't do much better if the rest of his team were high school players.

Integrated Teams: These are the teams where the value of the team is almost entirely a function of how well the team works as a unified whole. In the world of sports this is the syncronized swimming, or bobsled team. There is very little if any room for a superstar to excel and the team is at its best when in complete uniformity, when no part stands out. There is obviously a minimum level of fitness required to be on the team but the hard work is in the coordination, getting everybody to move together and to act as one. We on the outside look at the team as a whole and evaluate them in terms of the collective output. There is very little value in one swimmer (or at least the output isn't very impressive); the value of the team exists only as the collection of parts. To use a business term, it is only synergy and any part on its own has very little if any value. In the business world, these are committees where consensus is required for any decision to be made.

Clearly, these three catagories are arbitrary and the reality is that the groups above are points on a specturm. Every team falls on this spectrum somewhere. There is probably some value of thinking of the teams in your life and where they fall in this spectrum but the whole reason I bring this up is to point out there can be very wide definitions and understandings of what a team should be.

The engineering teams in industry I've been on are much closer to a track team than a synchronized swimming team. If the track team is a ten and the synchronized swimming team is a zero then I'd say the engineering teams I have experience with fall somewhere between an eight and a nine. The teams I worked on at school were more like a four. Part of the reason school projects end up being more integrated is that there is often a lack of clear leadership; this forces the team members into a consensus mindset. With a good clear leader in place, the team members can spend less time coordinating with everybody else and more time accomplishing their part of the project. Of course, in engineering classes, most people would prefer to do the engineering rather than the managing, thus the trouble. Maybe a specific team-work class would solve that problem.