A heresy will not leave me alone. It cuts against almost everything I have ever been told to believe about teams, sport, management and leadership. Yet the more I guiltily reflect on the idea, the truer it feels. My theme is very simple. Much of the effort that goes into management and team-building is not just fruitless, but detrimental. It is precisely when a team begins to think and feel “as one” that it becomes newly vulnerable. “There is no ‘I’ in team” is perhaps the best-known cliché in management. What if there shouldn’t be a “we”?
A team – any team – is more resilient when its mood is diversified. So the effort should be towards de-correlating individual performances. A team can survive one or two people being off colour. It is when everyone goes down together (case study: a batting collapse) that disaster strikes. The ever-expanding management class, however, by constantly trying to bind colleagues into a unit, accidentally increases the risks facing the team.
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