7 Myths Involving Teamwork

7 myths involving teamwork

Govind Subramaniam

UoPeople - BUS 5113 – AY2017-T4

Myth#1: Teams are harmonious: Smooth interaction among collaborators avoids time-wasting debates about how best to proceed.

Reality: Having a team of the same profile is often a barrier to future success. Teams become predictable with lack of innovation, inflexibility and lack sense of urgency.

Myth#2: Team conflict is unhealthy: Rodney King's famous rhetorical question ("Why can't we all just get along?")

Reality: Conflict, when well managed and focused on a team’s objectives, can generate more creative solutions than one sees in conflict-free groups.

Myth#3: Most people like teamwork

Reality: Each individual is different and the team needs to accommodate this without compromising the team objectives or values.

Myth#4: Teamwork is essential to business success: All one has to do is gather up some really talented people and tell them in general terms what is needed–the team will work out the details.

Reality: Teams thrive on complexity; Give teams unchallenging tasks and they become bored, allowing individual needs to come to the fore and over time the teamwork will disintegrate to working in silos.

Myth#5: Teams are easy to influence and manage

Reality: A very different skillset for leading a team is required wherein team leaders try to limit their role in delegating and empowering others, seek for talent and tend to develop leaders.

Myth#6: Senior Managers encourage teamwork.

Reality: Far from encouraging teamwork, senior managers are uneasy with the loss of control that teamwork appears to bring with it. They get uncomfortable with the process and the potential for exposing their own weaknesses and loss of control.

Myth#7: Leaders are born: – you either have the leadership traits and skills or you don’t, they cannot be learned.

Leadership skills are learnable traits that with study and practice can be improved. Keep at it, learn from others, learn from one’s own mistakes, and one will continue to become better at leadership. (Walter, E. 2013).

To suggest that leaders do not enter the world with extraordinary endowment is to imply that people enter the world with equal abilities, with equal talents.” (Thomas Carlyle 1840). All remarkable leaders have great history behind them: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, they were leaders from the onset of their journey.