The ideal team: 11 hard things about it

A new employee: first come the oper­a­tional skills. Orders, calls, invoices, prob­lems with part­ners, orders again, calls again… Because of all that, we forget what we should be talk­ing about in the first place: why do we work? For whom? What are our goals? How are we going to reach them?

After all, the answers to these ques­tions are, in essence, the very glue that binds a group of people into a team. Without it, people just gather at the same time in the same place and make strange movements. Sometimes some­one pays them for it. Sometimes they manage to do some­thing useful at the same time, but rarely… and by pure chance.

So, let me try to pic­ture an ideal team, one that doesn’t get paid by chance:

  1. They have no job titles, but they do have dis­trib­uted duties. (How that works, I haven’t fig­ured out myself yet.)
  2. They help each other, whether or not it’s part of their duties. (Oh, that’s prob­a­bly the expla­na­tion for point 1.)
  3. All the more so, you never hear the phrase “And why should I be the one doing this?”
  4. Nobody owes any­body any­thing: every­one came of their own free will.
  5. They under­stand why they’ve come to work and what the absolutely ulti­mate goal of it is. Everything they do serves that goal.
  6. They’re honest (sin­cere) with each other: they’re not afraid to admit their mis­takes and to point out each other’s.
  7. Mistakes are made in order to be fixed, not hidden.
  8. They know how to learn and how to teach each other.
  9. To some extent they’re even respon­si­ble for one another.
  10. They turn work into a pleas­ant pas­time: you can’t spend a third of your life with­out enjoy­ing it, can you?
  11. Their leader is part of their team.

Right, we’ve pic­tured the ideal team. Now off to bed; we have one to build. I sup­pose we should start at the begin­ning: with those gluey ques­tions about ends and means.