THE GREAT CONUNDRUM: YOU VS.

THE TEAM
By THOMAS A. STEWART

Fortune; Vol. 134 Issue 10, p165-166

You're supposed to be a team player. You're also supposed to look out for No. 1. How can
you do both?

Squatting between the lines of the "new contract" between employer and employee is an
ugly and befuddling contradiction. You know what the new contract says: We, your
employer, no longer offer or even imply a guarantee of employment--you're here only as
long as we need you. Instead, we offer you employability--stick with us, kid, and we'll
reward you well, and when we dissolve the bonds, no hard feelings, no stigma, no
problem. Plenty of people will want you because you picked up valuable skills here. Two
birds in the bush are worth one in the hand.

That's the deal; here's the contradiction. On the one hand, you're on your own. You're
responsible for your career. You're the CEO of "You Inc." in an every-man-for-himself
universe of individual initiative and reward; whatever color your parachute is, you sew it
and pack it yourself. Ah, but on the other hand, folks here at ol' Amalgamated don't cotton
to self-aggrandizement. We want team players, all for one and one for all, because we're a
team and we work in teams. Teams may hire their own members, manage their own
work, receive rewards as a group, and parcel them out to members according to their
collective view of each person's contribution to the group's enterprise. Of the skills you
learn here, the most valuable is teamwork.

So it's You Inc. vs. the Team. Says David Witte, CEO of Ward Howell International, an
executive search firm: "Do we have a problem here? Oh, yeah, we got a big problem.
Talk about individual responsibility--it's absolutely important. But you're part of a team--
that's absolutely important. But has anybody married that?" The short answer: No, and
maybe the marriage can't be made. But maybe we can find ways to help You Inc. get
along in a world of teams.

Mind you, this taffy pull--toward the self, toward the team--is ancient; it's probably as old
as the use of sports images in business. Under the old dispensation, however, obeisance
paid. When Organization Man subordinated his ego to the group, he got safety in return.
Now you can do that and still be on the street when this project is done.

Today's teams are, well, teamier--less a metaphor and more a reality. Gone is the phony
"team" where the leader tells the finance guru to run some numbers, the marketing wiz to
do some research, the manufacturing maven to come up with cost and capacity data, and
everyone to report back two weeks hence. These days team members are likely to work
together many hours a day, mucking about in one another's specialties and jointly
hammering out the final product rather than slotting together individually made
components.
Why does teamwork matter more? First, the content and culture of knowledge work
require it. Simple-minded work--may I offer pinmaking as an example?--permits a
division of labor in which people don't have to work together so long as the pieces of the
system fit. But knowledge work--designing a product, writing an ad, reengineering a
process--rarely moves systematically forward. It's an open-ended series of to-and-fro
collaborations, iterations, and reiterations. Says Fran Engoran, senior partner for
intellectual capital at Price Waterhouse Consulting: "Complex, cross-functional business
problems demand a diverse set of skills. 'It takes a team,' Mrs. Clinton might say."

Fly solo on these teams, and you'll be ostracized so fast one would think you'd been
caught wiping your nose on the tablecloth at Lutece. The ethos is to make your
teammates look good, not to make sure the boss knows how much you contributed. Him
you can fool, but your teammates value only substance. "Shark skills are not
appreciated," says George Bailey, a Price Waterhouse consultant who is an expert on
teams. "Dolphins beat up on sharks." The cult(ure) of teamwork helps explain why
people give themselves self-effacing titles like "facilitator" and "coach" instead of "boss"
or "leader."

If knowledge work depends on teams, it makes sense to reward them, not individuals.
People who move from project to project cannot be paid according to the number of
direct reports they have any more than a road warrior can flaunt her status by the number
of windows her office has. Top industrial-design firm Ideo Product Development (it
designed the mouse for both Apple and Microsoft, and the snazzy housing for Silicon
Graphics computers) is a good example. It has several "vice presidents" who awarded
themselves the title to get the free subscriptions some magazines give VPs. Ideo's
performance reviews used to be done by a person's boss and two peers of the employee's
own choosing, but that system, offbeat though it was, had to be scrapped a couple of
years ago when the company realized that for many employees (more than one in ten) it
was impossible to identify a boss. Now people pick two peers plus one from a slate of six
"management types." According to Tom Kelley, people tend to pick demanding
evaluators: "The culture says don't pick softies, because this is about improving
performance, not about getting ahead."

This kind of teamwork can be very seductive to the individual. At work or on the playing
fields of Eton, everyone has experienced transcendental teamwork, a sweet spot of
accomplishment and fellow-feeling. When it's working, says Ward Howell's Witte, "the
more you contribute, the more other people promote you. It is inspiring." Out at Boeing,
people on the teams that make the 777 jetliner weep when one of those babies rolls out of
the hangar. "Hot groups," emeritus Stanford business professor Harold J. Leavitt calls
them. While they last they can make you think, if your mind inclines this way, that
Rousseau was right: In the state of nature we were noble savages, none better than any
other, free adherents to a social contract, and if we could only extirpate hierarchy we
could return to that paradisiacal place of mutual and reciprocal fraternity.

Teams can do extraordinary work, but it's a dicey proposition to put You Inc.'s fate in
collectivist hands. Teams are often inhospitable to oddballs and to some forms of
ambition. Says Ideo's Kelley: "I warn recruits, if your needs are to climb the ladder, don't
come here. Ambition is getting on the coolest projects." Peer-oriented meritocracy
flourishes at Ideo, says Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford's engineering school who is
writing a book about the company. But, he cautions, it succeeds partly because the work
is so complex that the hottest hotshots know they can't go it alone, and also because Ideo
sits smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, where a reputation as a great teammate is the
ticket to new ventures.

But there are limits. From a company's point of view, teams are of doubtful value as
nurseries of executive talent, because no one knows why great teams come together or
how to replicate their magic. The experience might happen once in a lifetime. By
contrast, Douglas Smith, a consultant and author of Taking Charge of Change, says that
with the old machinery of promotion and rewards, "when superiors made a judgment to
move you up a grade, they could be pretty comfortable that you'd live up to their
expectations." As for money, companies can rarely offer significant incentives--the kind
that change your life--to reward teamwork. A smallish company of 1,000 people might
have a couple of hundred teams, with many people serving on more than one. "How in
the world can you ever keep track of it all?" Smith asks.

Companies always say they plump for the pack over the wolf-- there's a reason it's called
corporate life--but they're really looking for leadership. When Laurie Siegel, director of
compensation policy at AlliedSignal, sees a great team, "I will ask, 'Was leadership what
made it great?' The answer is always yes. Then I ask, 'Who were the leaders?' and it is
always easy to name them." Those are the people AlliedSignal is determined to keep and
to create careers for. To be sure, leaders need team skills--as Siegel puts it, "Lone Rangers
or political types don't survive at this company"--but they're a means to what AlliedSignal
sees as the greater end. Siegel calls it "a culture of individualism that drives team
performance," a paradoxical phrase that brings us back to our problem, You Inc. vs. the
Team.

So what's to do? First, Smith says, "get a life: You need team skills to succeed." You can
find an argument about whether team players are products of nature or nurture, but people
compete for status in any group. The "status auction" is more polite in a team culture like
Ideo's, says Sutton--it might reward sharing and punish dissers or swaggerers--but it still
goes on. Even a natural-born egoist can be a valued teammate and adapt to local rules.

But--second--don't believe everything you hear about teams. Take team-play rhetoric to
its limits, and you'd think capitalism had spawned New Soviet Man. Look at the business
plan instead. Says Witte: "If you've got a company with a 9% net profit and it needs to get
to 11% or 12%, and a couple of divisions are way below average, you want someone to
shake up that organization but good. A team player? Not necessarily. But if the strategy is
niche acquisitions, improved customer focus, a new service organization--then you need a
team builder."

Third, whatever you do, put yourself on what George Bailey calls "the shareholder value
team." You ought to be able to tell a convincing story--that is, an honest one--about how
your work or your team's work has increased the value of the company. If that story's
true, You Inc. will be fine. If it's not, no team can help you.