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What is it good for - Team Work
From BoF 1
Edwin Starr passed
judgement on War. Now, we at the BoF
take up the challenge and ask: Team
Work. Ung, what is it good for?
Scan the pages of any job
advertisement, be it for a strategic commissioning manager, Performance &
Change facilitator or even something useful, like a bin man, invariably there
will be, nestling amongst the other drivel of the person specification, the
need for any prospective candidate to be a team player of the highest order.
A cursory glance at the many, many applications that I have subjected
myself to over the years shows that the ‘ability to work as an effective team
member’, ‘to be able to work as part of a team’ to ‘work effectively as part of
the team’, or the rather sinister euphemism of ‘Committee /work-group
participation skills essential’ were vital if my grubby, unemployed form were
to make it to the fabled shortlist and earn respectability. After
thirteen months of being grubby and unemployed, I concluded that if you’ve not
emerged from a week’s jungle skills session with your party carrying a speared
gazelle between them and singing a bonding melody favoured by US marines, you’ve
no bloody chance.
Faced with this ever present essential on the long path to employment us
hopeful job seekers rack our brains, teasing out examples of how we are most
definitely not dangerous loners who will stab colleagues at the first given
opportunity. Ooo, Ooo, I rang Linda in payroll once, because Jim’s tax
was too high and... No, I give up, I’m a dangerous loner. Don’t
employ me. But rarely in this self-abnegating process do we ever question
its basis. Wrestling with the problem of finding a way to make ‘well, I
talk to people sometimes’ sound like another stunning example of team dynamism
the existential clouds gather. Who am I? Am I a team player?
A sudden insightful beam pierces the swirling nimbi of doubt.
No, comes the reply, I like to get things done to be honest.
Thus does the disdain for the blanket concept of teamwork begin to
crystallise.
The half assed researcher's bible, Wikipedia, provides this startling nugget of
team adulation from the USA:
'A 2003 national representative survey, HOW-FAIR, revealed that
Americans think that 'being a team player' was the most important factor in
getting ahead in the workplace. This was ranked higher than several factors,
including 'merit and performance', 'leadership skills', 'intelligence', 'making
money for the organization' and 'long hours'.
The nonsense of long hours could possibly be countenanced as less important,
but intelligence? Leadership? Why is the adoration of the team so
pervasive? I have yet to encounter an organization that is not hindered
at every turn by their insistence on, instead of one person doing something,
multiples of 5 and upwards being involved. This, in my experience, is a
waste of everyone involved’s time, effort, energy and life in general. Perhaps
I am being a little myopic in my condemnation. Allowances could possibly
be made for, say, the teams involved in erecting the Pyramids of Egypt, sending
man to the moon or even those primitive packs of hunter gathers who first
felled a lumbering mammoth out on the frozen tundra. Those with
sophisticated debating skills could no doubt provide a strong case for team
work being in fact the foundation of all civilization and human progress.
Thankfully, this being the BoF, we don’t have to bother with any of that
balanced argument tripe and can continue apace with the belligerent rant, feet
firmly rooted to the soapbox. However, the examples cited above are
useful in pinpointing the grist of my ire. Teams in the modern workplace
are useless. This is possibly more of a flaw in the modern workplace, but
nevertheless, as soon as the phrase ‘team working’ or any of its derivatives
invade my conscious mind a profound despair overwhelms me. Appropriately,
the ever insightful Despair,inc succinctly sums up the situation: “Meetings -
None of us is as dumb as all of us.”
Take an average team meeting. The room is booked for 9:30. By about
quarter to 10 everyone has managed to turn up, bar one who will arrive 40
minutes late possibly sporting a crown of thorns and carrying an oversized
wooden cross on her back. Others will murmur in sympathy at the terrible
car journey the latecomer has had to endure despite the fact he/she lives 15
minutes walk away. Such lateness is rendered irrelevant however as four
or five members of the team will have spent the last 20 minutes trying to find
tea and coffee, struggling to work the kettle, struggling again to locate milk,
open the biscuits, pass the biscuits around and finally eating the biscuits and
downing their drug of choice. Some minutes will then pass as everyone
complains about the quality of this drug. But then it’s down to business
as the flip chart emerges and the team leader leaves the room to find paper and
a marker pen that works. (The exact same amount of time will be wasted if
a laptop and projector are involved – a mathematical phenomena yet to be
adequately explained) Then a good hour or so of ineffectual idiocy can
really get going. That key tool of the team ethos, the absurdity of
brainstorming or 'mind showering', highlights what is wrong with the whole
concept of modern teamworking – after years of being instructed to engage the
brain before opening one’s mouth, a team meeting actively encourages you to
speak before you think. And thus does modern society crumble.
Britain,
like much of the western world has long ceased to produce anything of value,
therefore, to keep the population economically buoyant, more jobs have to be
conjured out of thin air. We are, apparently, in the midst of the
knowledge economy. Knowledge of what remains elusively difficult to
pinpoint. Where sixty years ago one person could be given a job and get
on with it, (granted, this job may have been coming up with the best way to
massacre people, it being wartime and all that) now a team of ten are employed
to spread their knowledge around like manure in the hope of fertile returns.
As no-one knows what they are supposed to have knowledge of, fine
sprouting crops remain buried under a thick layer of bullshit - witness the
billions spent by the current government on consultants, the chaos and
ineffectuality they add to the running of the country.
Ever keen to embrace time consuming, expensive and ultimately useless new
technology, the startling prospect of teams working via intranet forums has
even arisen. Everyone knows the function of a forum is to insult American
teenagers by slighting their obsession with wrestling, waste time or rant in an
ill informed and hopefully offensive manner (please note batofury.co.uk/forum)
- Verbiage, in other words. The prospect of hundreds of team players
indulging in cyberspace waffle and bickering makes me shudder for future
generations.
The obsession with team working suggests an endemic loss of faith in the
individual. Since the infallibly of authority was challenged by annoying
sixties radicals looking for plentiful sex and wearing berets,
organizations now refuse to have confidence in one person to do a job well.
This diffusion of responsibility has many advantages for the modern workplace, first
and foremost the fact the no one can be blamed for the inevitable shambles that
results from too many humans fannying about. The fact that a nation can
wage war and kill thousands on the basis of flimsy intelligence can now be
labelled a 'collective failure'. Team work has put paid to quaint and
archaic notions such as 'honour' or 'dignity'. Now everyone's to blame so
nobody is to blame. Hurrah! Full responsibility can be taken but no
one has to lose their job.
In a system where there is nothing useful to do, team work is the fail safe
that ensures that nothing useful will ever be done about the system. A virulent misogynist could go even further -
team working could be seen as a feminized work practice. The
multi-tasking woman with her elaborately communicative hemispheres is ideally
suited to talking about several things and getting none of them done. The
humble male with his single minded simplicity has been sidelined, as why employ
one person to do a job when 7 can blather on about it providing endless
opportunities for role filling procrastination. But the BoF being an
inclusive new man kind of place would never suggest such things and appeal to
woman haters throughout the world to utilize specialist web forums (please
note, not Batofury.co.uk/forum)
What is possibly the final
nail in the coffin of team work's reputation is the fact that the concept has
been absorbed by academia, the high tower of blathering ineffectuality, as a
subject for study and theory. The suspiciously named Dr R Meredith Belbin
set out 9 types of personality which are on display in team situations. For
those whose eyes shrivel at the sight of management theory, the BoF has
provided a cut out and keep guide to help you through those tedious
meetings.
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Belbin’s Team Roles
1 Coordinator. This person will complicate matters
immeasurably by producing websites, minutes, meaningless charts and thousands
of words in an attempt to justify the amount of time he/she has wasted doing
this. He/she will badger bored team members into producing yet more
meaningless twaddle. They are over-confident and will summarise the view
of the group in bizarre and unrecognizable ways.
2 Shaper. The shaper is full of
pointless ambition. They are quite happy to trample over others to ensure
their name is first, biggest and boldest on the front of the finished report.
They push their own views forward in an attempt to win the one-man 'who's balls
are the biggest' competition, and in doing so reveal the utter idiocy of those
views. And his/her balls.
3 Plant. This member is the one who
is most likely to come out with original ideas and challenge the traditional
way of thinking about things. Unfortunately, original does not mean good.
The plant will take the group off on absurd tangents wasting everybody's
time, as his/her ideas are invariably the product of a mind long since
destroyed by marital break up, parental neglect or sibling rivalry.
4 Resource investigator. The resource investigator will plagiarise from the internet with
gusto, often unaware of the blatant illegality or sheer uselessness of the
mountain of dross he/she produces.
5 Implementer. Will know every
directive, section and subsection of every corporate, policy outline
specification document ever written. He/she will therefore make implementation
an insurmountable task.
6 Team worker. The team worker is
the one who hopes for conflict and back-stabbing. He/she attempts to
derive a personality by gossiping like a playground bitch. They are sensitive
to others' weaknesses and will attempt to bolster their own fragile sense of
self worth by poisoning any potential harmony.
7 Completer. Always on hand to
provide a sense of panic. Despite having seven months to finish a
meaningless project the completer will send out a barrage of hysterical emails
on day two, suggesting working weekends and late nights.
8 Monitor evaluator. The monitor
evaluator is good at seeing all the options. And
towards the end of a project he/she will suggest the team do a completely
different option rather than finishing the one they've started.
9 Specialist. Could have had the job
done three months ago without all this shiting about.
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Belbin, does however, fail to
detect the coaster, the shirker, and the pissed off human being watching
his/her life ebb away on a slow tide of shite.
All in all, conclusive
evidence, I'm sure you will agree (if not, piss off then) that team work is
rubbish. What is it good for? Over to you Edwin –
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