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Team Effectiveness: The Hazards of Collaboration
By harveyrobbins | July 8, 2007
If competition is “bad,” then collaboration must always be good, right?
Wrong. Pure collaboration is as problematic as pure competition. Each has its purposes. But each, practiced to the exclusion of the other, leads to collapse.
Unabated competition, like a Panzer division rolling over Poland, creates a spirit of over-the-top, scorched-earth absolutism — legitimizing whatever means result in victory: treachery, deceit, corruption, murder.
Unabated collaboration is also problematic. It is the nemesis of individuality, progress, diversity, and change.
Here are some of the hallmarks of supercollaboration:
1. Sameness - Overly collaborative teams adopt rigid standards and impose them on themselves, foreclosing creative deviation.
2. Groupthink - This leads to purges of perceived outsiders, and stultification of the ideas of insiders.
3. Blurriness - Too much democracy leads to mush. When everyone has full and equal input into a process, you can bet that process will lack focus.
4. Slowness - Consensus doesn’t “snap to” the way intimidated agreement does. It is a slow ooze, and teams lose momentum waiting for the ooze to arrive.
5. Leaderlessness - When everyone is encouraged to lead, the end result often is that no one does.
6. Defenselessness - When everyone knows everything, because sharing is so important, there is no confidentiality, and there are no firewalls. Some teams become so intimate and sensitive with one another that they can’t function among outsiders.
7. Interiority - Teams who work too long together have a way of becoming cross-eyed over time, focusing on subjects of interest exclusively to the group.
8. Mercilessness - “The many are stronger than the one”, is the motto of supercollaboration. It is also the motto of fascism.
Topics: Team Effectiveness |