Bob ... The word "team" gets a lot of use, in your writing, in the media, and in my work environment... and it's getting on my nerves. If every petty organization is a "team", who's the coach; what prize are all those teams vying for and what's the "game" they're trying to win? I fully realize that business can be a game with customers as the prize and that even corporate success (climbing the ladder, rec Bob … The word “team” gets a lot of use, in your writing, in the media, and in my work environment… and it’s getting on my nerves. If every petty organization is a “team”, who’s the coach; what prize are all those teams vying for and what’s the “game” they’re trying to win? I fully realize that business can be a game with customers as the prize and that even corporate success (climbing the ladder, recognition, additional resources,…) can also be considered a game as well. But here are my concerns…. I’ve played on a lot of teams and most of them are entirely dysfunctional without a good coach and achievable goals. Teams are full of prima-donnas, players, and laggards (laggards put out just enough to stay on the line, but not enough to truly excel). Coaches get the primas to pass the ball/puck/what-have-you to the players and the team does better. Good coaches can turn the laggards into players making a team even more successful. The catch to this success is that the players have to want to be coached the way that coach wants to coach. (Look at any professional, or near professional sports team, for proof. Coaches are switched and no team members, yet performance improves… what happened?) So it’s very important that we determine who’s on the team, who’s the coach, and what’s the prize. The point is, if every single division is a team, which I propose isn’t true, what is the prize they are going for? Customers? Nope, that’s the company’s prize. Greater budget and corporate power? That seems like a good candidate. So if every team is vying for this same prize, then this sounds like a recipe for disaster since required, often critical, parts may be sacrificed to support the winning teams that have the highest efficiency in grabbing available resources. This describes cancer quite well which, I’m sure we can agree, is a bad thing. Lets face facts, there is only one team in any organization and the players all have titles like President, Vice President, or Chief something and the coach is most often someone with the title of Chief Executive Officer or some such. Quite often you may see player-coaches, but that’s the team folks. They’re together because they have to be together, playing as one to get the prize and sharing the glory that comes with it. The rest of the company is part of an organization. That organization is the body of one of the players and if one of those organisms isn’t performing up to snuff, it gets excised. Player’s are not that easy to get rid of. So, while it may be vogue and somehow cozy to go around telling your employees that they’re part of a team, they’re really part of a working group. If the group does good and is beneficial to the player it will get more blood and energy (funding and staff) to grow… if not, it’s either starved or cut out. So please, please, stop promoting this team malarkey, almost every one of us is part of a group. You’re either part of a group or the group leader performing a function that has value. If you’re a group leader you had better be talking to the other group leaders to ensure that they don’t start to think of you as a cancer and get the player to have you removed. The next time you’re about to say, “My team will…” ask yourself are my team members easy to replace,… am I? Will the replacement of any of the afore-mentioned affect achieving the customer prize? If not, then you’re not on the team, you’re inside a player; and now you know that what you should say is “How can we help you achieve your goal?”. Because the most important thing for an organization is to be sure of only one thing, “What game is my player playing?” to ensure its survival. – Teeming with irritation Dear Teeming … It’s a case of different definitions for the same word. If it matters, the relevant dictionary definition is “a number of persons associated together in work or activity,” which is a bit different from yours. It’s a bit different from mine, as well: To me, the difference between a team and a group is that a team is aligned to a common purpose where in a group the individuals are each aligned to their personal purposes. The best way to turn a group into a team is to establish interdependencies so that no individual can achieve a relevant goal without collaboration with other team members. No doubt about it, the term “team” is used carelessly. I don’t mind it too much, because mostly it’s misapplied as a matter of wishful thinking. People wish the group in question functioned as a team when in fact it doesn’t. I do need to address your issue as to whether a division or department can have its own goals or “prize.” Sure they can. Certainly, carried to excess this creates dysfunctional organizations (the common term is “organizational silos”). But in any organization of any size at all, it’s required that the organization create subdivisions that focus on specific responsibilities. The alternative is chaos. And once you’ve decided that (for example) Marketing is responsible for sales, advertising, brand, and market strategy, it has to have its own goals. That’s just another way of saying it has to be focused on accomplishing something useful. It gets unhealthy when divisional goals aren’t integrated into corporate goals. That’s a different issue entirely from whether it’s valid for each organizational unit to have goals. My suggestion, although you didn’t ask for it, is this: Instead of decrying overuse of the word team, insist that the groups you’re part of become teams, aligned with a common purpose, collaborating to achieve clear and worthwhile goals. – Bob ——– Technology Industry