TEAMWORK: From the Individual Lens to the Collective Lens

Дата публикации: 14-09-2026 02:44:28

How do we help people truly connect and work well together? The question has never been easy. We have invented countless ways to strengthen teamwork, yet few of them work, and those that do rarely last. Between 2012 and 2015, Google looked for what makes a team succeed through its well-known Project Aristotle. It began by assuming the answer lay in bringing exceptional individuals together. It found that success depends not on who is on the team, but on how the team works together. The research pointed to five factors:Psychological SafetyDependabilityStructure & ClarityMeaningImpact 



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 Look closely, and you'll notice that none of these five can be measured precisely, and none can be built, let alone sustained, without real investment and genuine attention. Perhaps that is why so many companies, for so many years, have misunderstood teamwork. They have poured resources into efforts whose value fades almost as soon as they end, "done just to be done, and then everything goes back to the way it was": the traditional off-site team-building trip, the after-work games and dinners. In 1983, R. Wayne Boss (Team Building and the Problem of Regression: The Personal Management Interview as an Intervention) showed that team building does bring improvement, but that teams slowly slip back into their old ways. This is known as the regression, or fade-out, effect. Glaser (1994), in Teamwork and Communication: A 3-Year Case Study of Change, came to the same conclusion: the effects of team building do not last. When people return to the same work, in the same environment, nothing in them changes. In other words, teamwork does not grow from the number of team-building events we hold. It grows from the system we build and the way we run it. As long as those stay the same, isolated team-building activities can do little to keep teamwork strong over time.The Individual LensA team is made of people, and each person is shaped by what they carry inside in that moment. When we are under constant pressure at work, or carrying fears that never quite leave us, it becomes very hard to do our work well. How can you work with fear always sitting in your mind? With your cortisol "always running high" and your whole body braced to fight or to flee? People who feel threatened and pressured struggle with their own work, and they struggle even more to work alongside others. Steinbeis et al. (2015), in The effects of stress and affiliation on social decision-making: Investigating the tend-and-befriend pattern, found that people under heavy stress tend to trust less. In my experience, when a team is under intense pressure, members tend to step away from shared responsibility and reach first to protect themselves.Let us return to where we began, to the five factors I mentioned. The first two are the medicine that can heal all of this. A team needs a safe space to work in (Psychological Safety), a space to experiment and discover the best way of working. And when each person has that safe space, they begin to reach out to one another (Dependability).The Team LensA team is more than a group of individuals placed side by side. It’s also the way those individuals meet one another. A team is an invisible boundary that holds people in the same place, working together day after day. A team carries limits that are part of its nature, and strengths beyond measure for those who know how to draw them out.Its inherent weaknesses:The more of us, the less effective we become. The amount of work done has never measured effectiveness. Effectiveness also lives in the value of that work, its quality, the waste it creates, and how well we move together. As a team grows, communication tends to become less transparent as channels multiply. Smaller circles form within the larger one, as Dunbar's Number suggests. And a message passed from person to person slowly loses its shape, like a whisper down a line.The trap of specialization. Teams are often organized by specialty, by layers of work, or around a single kind of task. Such teams may excel at their craft, yet struggle to work with others. Each member becomes a specialist who pays little attention to those beside them. The team, in turn, looks after only its own piece, with little care for the rest of the work or the larger picture. Put differently, specialization may increase productivity, but it quietly takes away a team's ability to collaborate, think broadly, and create.Dependence on individuals and collective narcissism (People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck). Watch a newly formed team, and you will often see a few strong individuals rise to speak, to shape, to lead, while others, quite naturally, step back and prefer to follow. Over time, this breeds dependence, and a team that moves by the will of a few, because the ideas come only from those who like to lead. Teams also tend to form an image of themselves and keep reinforcing it. In some ways, this can drive a team to grow. More often, though, it turns into something darker: it makes "enemies" of other teams and slowly wears away the connections between the teams that make up an organization. Once more, let me bring you back to where we started and connect the team lens with two factors: Structure & Clarity and Meaning. When structure, and the clarity between structures, does not help people and teams grow safely but pushes against them instead, then no matter how deeply someone believes in working together, they will become passive. If what we want is an effective team, not merely a productive one, then we must keep the team at the right size, avoid over-specialization, create an environment where learning never stops, and above all, move away from local incentives that celebrate individual (or team) achievement, such as "the person or team who got the most done." Instead, we can focus on the goal we share and how we work together: celebrating the value we create for the product as a whole, and celebrating the support members give one another, and teams give each other.The Organizational LensWhat an organization places at its center directly shapes the impact it receives in return. What if that center is profit at any cost? What if it will stop at nothing to get it? Could such an organization ever have teams and people who truly work well together? Would it ever see people as people? The Wells Fargo scandal and the Boeing 737 MAX tragedies are real examples of mistakes made at the organizational level. When your direction is wrong, every value within it loses its meaning. What, then, is teamwork for? The way such companies operate may leave no room for teamwork. (Further reading: Industrialism’s Dehumanization Trap)In the end, an organization needs profit to grow. But that profit must rest on the real value it brings to its customers and to society. And if we can draw a clear line from the work of each person, each team, each group, and the whole organization to that final value, so that everyone can see the difference they make for customers, and beyond them for society, that becomes a deeply powerful source of motivation. That is Impact, the thing that awakens every part of an organization.In short, teamwork is a rare delicacy. Everyone wants it, but not everyone is willing to pay for it, or truly needs it.Don't mindlessly spend money on temporary fixes, hoping teamwork will somehow improve, without a deep, holistic view of what is really happening. Have you dared to pay the price — a change in how your leaders think, the courage to reshape your system, and the willingness to let go of short-term performance numbers — to bring the five factors from the beginning of this article into your own system, your own organization? Vietnamese version available here : TEAMWORK: từ góc nhìn cá nhân tới góc nhìn tập thể References:Image: Idea by Khoa Doan | Image generated with AI (Gemini)Understand team effectiveness (2015) – The re:Work Editorial Team – https://rework.withgoogle.com/intl/en/guides/understand-team-effectivenessTeam Building and the Problem of Regression: The Personal Management Interview as an Intervention – R. Wayne Boss – https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Team-Building-and-the-Problem-of-Regression%3A-The-as-Boss/88478b2a8ca0fa1b247866a064d6ebff94fd621dTeamwork and Communication: A 3-Year Case Study of Change – Susan R. Glaser – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0893318994007003003The effects of stress and affiliation on social decision-making: Investigating the tend-and-befriend pattern – Nikolaus Steinbeis, Veronika Engert, Roman Linz, Tania Singer – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26311359/Dunbar's number – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_numberPeople of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil – M. Scott Peck – https://www.amazon.com/People-Lie-Hope-Healing-Human/dp/0684848597Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_cross-selling_scandalBoeing's 737 MAX 8 Disasters – MIT Sloan Teaching Resources Library – https://mitsloan.mit.edu/teaching-resources-library/boeings-737-max-8-disasters   

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