Is being a team player overrated?

There’s no arguing that nothing much can be achieved solo, for the worthy tasks are
typically humongous and human capacities are revealingly finite. Even the deeply held
romanticism with the solitary genius—of the likes of da Vinci, Ramanujan, Einstein, and
Picasso has been solemnly dismissed. The corporate milieu, with its cascading of
objectives and division of labour, has further legitimised team play, and to be good with
groups is deemed as a non-negotiable.

Such is the unwavering commitment to the squad that work is often designed in a way that brings people together, akin to the tail wagging the dog. Shouldn’t a team come onboard only when it’s impossible for one to pull it all? Or should work be designed in a manner that keeps the maximum number of people occupied?

Is being a team player the only way one can continue to offer value? Is there no place for the
solitary types in the upper echelons? Let’s indulge in some counter arguments.

Where do teams emerge? Teams are essentially in the service of the task –whether it’s
battlefields or factories—work warrants people to come together. As per the historian, Yuval
Noah Harari, even the formation of religion was to achieve large-scale collaboration. Except
that teams do not automatically enable collaboration, and that’s where the kernel of
workforce dysfunction lies.

Teams are often created for the sake of teams, justifying somebody’s hegemony or span of control, and then those who don’t seem to be team players enough are eased out of the system.

As a result, those who excel as individual contributors camouflage themselves as team players, undermining not just their own capabilities but also organisational performance. As exigencies remind us, people come together in the most spontaneous and altruistic manner when the occasion warrants. Everything else is a deadweight loss.

In the corporate parlance, the teeming teams are a result of the division of labour, which could be traced back to the industrial revolution and the legitimisation of capitalism as a means of wealth amassment and distribution. The artisan who would make a beautiful quilt over a long period of time gave way to several artists working on specific pieces of the puzzle, well placed on an assembly line, all in the service of incessant productivity.

With this fine division of labour –where one must mind that narrow piece of the value chain – no one knows how exactly the whole is brought to the bearing. In comes technology, and the creator gets further distanced from the created, ad infinitum, and only God knows how it’s all done.

Sample this: How many artists can today make a bicycle, end to end? A team of pygmies is in order to assemble the pieces, where none know anything beyond the narrow work remit, and is acutely aware of one’s dispensability. Alas, we gain productivity and scale, but at an incalculable cost of creativity.

Creativity, which is the act of generating ideas that are both novel and useful, is the currency
of the future. With machines cornering a huge chunk of repetitive, often mindless tasks, we
are thankfully permitted to tackle the larger, more enduring subjects. Never mind that very
few are left with any semblance of what the big endeavour looks like. Creativity calls for big
picture thinking, owning up to the outcome, liberty to make course changes, and the courage to
go wrong – all of which is robbed of as a team player. With the job atomisation, the
ownership is divided while the failures are multiplied.

Whose neck is on the line? That’s why you don’t see movies co-directed, novels co-authored, or podiums shared. Indeed, a team is behind the scenes, but only in service of a bigger cause, and when it comes to creativity, the numbers don’t just add up.

Creativity, or problem-solving in general, can be thought of as a four-stage process—preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The preparation, or saturation, stage is about gathering information on the problem to be solved, including the background literature and the context. The incubation stage is the slow hunch where the dots start to connect effortlessly, often in the background of conscious processing, and new insights emerge.

The illumination is the spontaneous ‘aha!’ moment when a solution arises to the conscious mind, which is then validated in the verification stage. It’s observed that the preparation and verification stages are collegial, benefiting from the voices of the complementary, whereas the incubation and illumination stages mandate solitude and access to the subconscious. The connected, team player gets past the preparation stage on the back of substantive homework and data, but then gets stuck when no novel insights emerge, and what follows is invariably banal.

Scores of researchers have studied, and creators have asserted the significance of solitude
in creative undertakings. A team is handy before and after the spark, but not terribly during.

That’s the territory where one is by oneself, and if here again a gang is in demand, creativity
remains elusive. This discomfort with self and the urge to be in a company only gets
exacerbated in the AI era, where a lot more heavy-lifting shifts to the fuzzy middle stages of
creativity. There’s hardly any dearth of data or even means of validating the ideas—the
premium is in sifting through the noise. A team’s contribution can readily be supplanted with
a faithful bot, relieving you of the burden of managing egos.

The good news is that if you excel in solitude and find managing people difficult, you needn’t
stress yourself. You can carve a significant role for yourself amid the crowd by sharpening
your intuition and native reasoning, and then teams will be reduced to celebration and not
creation. Don’t fake it till you make it. Rather, be.