A cursory glance at the employment section of any major newspaper will reveal those two insipid, tedious buzzwords.
"This position requires a strong team player."
"Excellent team player skills a must."
"Must be a flexible team player."
"Proven experience as a team player."
"Absolutely necessary to be a team player."
Every imaginable organisation requires some sort of "team player". Even one popular Beverly Hills spa requires a "true team player to complement our Hair Studio." Gee, has coiffuring become such a complicated affair that it requires a tag-team effort?
Human resources managers are falling all over themselves to recruit team players of every conceivable incarnation. Enthusiastic, proactive, dynamic, innovative, ambitious, collaborative, strategic-thinking, cross-functional, self-motivated, detail-oriented, results-oriented, and—my personal favourites—"consummate" and "unflappable" (being sought by a Detroit-based book publisher and a Toronto marketing firm).
Applying for nearly any position requires mercilessly and aggressively marketing one's "team player skills". Endlessly glorified in want-ads, career magazines, and employment firms the world over, being a team player has become the immutable gold standard for professional behaviour.
And, of course, the greater the number of brilliant team players there are in an organisation, the better.
Or is it? As Carl Jung once counselled, "The heaping together of paintings by Old Masters in museums is a catastrophe; likewise, a collection of a hundred Great Brains makes one big fathead."
Does there not come a point at which this insatiable hunger for team players starts to rub off as a collective, corporate...farce? Is there something shameful in not being a team player? I myself think not. But I am clearly in the minority—and thankfully so.
Barbara Reinhold of monster.com—the Internet's largest career resources portal—recently crafted an "Are you cut out for teamwork?" quiz. I scored a "6". The verbal interpretation of my score? "Ooops! You're a lone ranger. If you want to make it on a team, you'll need to adjust your attitude."
Adjust my attitude? The word says it all. There is something nefarious in being a lone ranger on the job. Those who prefer to work in solitude are branded a corporate liability. But doesn't Reinhold realise that countless of the world's greatest achievers would sooner have been gin-sodden dipsomaniacs in Thoreau's Walden Pond than immerse themselves in the invariably prosaic "team spirit" that today's corporate managers are so blindly peddling?
Look at Vincent van Gogh. William Randolph Hearst. Thomas Jefferson. Glenn Gould. J.D. Salinger (notwithstanding that he reportedly drank his own urine). None of these visionaries was part of any touchy-feely team. There are, of course, those who believe that creative genius is due as much to social influences as to individual forces. Alfonso Mortuori and Ronald Purser, for example, argue strongly for the social dimensions of creativity in their essay "Deconstructing the Lone Genius Myth"*. However, I still feel safe in assuming that none of the visionaries I just mentioned would have been caught dead in a "professional development" mountain retreat with his fellow "team members".
Not that these men disliked people, or even working with them. But they simply preferred working on their own. And the results spoke for themselves. (As Ferdinand mused in the Duchess of Malfi, "Eagles fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together." I personally, however, needn't have anything against the latter.)
The requirement that every potential hire be a team player is now so commonplace that many would-be employers make mundane, almost lackadaisical reference to it, even if they clearly have no clue what good "teamwork" really is. For instance, one biotechnology firm is currently seeking employees who are "the usual—a team player, with people skills."
One San Francisco Internet service provider wants a team of employees who are "happy, happy, happy" and "motivated to grow, grow, grow." Surely the human resources director at that firm would have a slightly more profound understanding of teamwork. My inclination is to believe that such firms are promoting teamwork not so much as an enrichment to the work environment but as a way of manipulating and controlling their workers.
In it not uncommon, for example, that advertising agencies force their employees to work countless, unpaid overtime in order to meet increasingly strict deadlines. Anyone who dares question such a practice is immediately branded a "poor team player" and is eventually shuffled back down to mailroom duty. This is a glaring example of the vulgarisation of teamwork.
I recently had the gross misfortune of being forced to complete a group presentation. Throughout the entire ordeal, I quietly reminded my peers that I am not a team player, and that they would do best to always keep this in mind. I didn't mean to say that I didn't like these people as individuals—they were all very nice people (well, except for one)—but I knew from my own past experiences that basically, if it's not my way, then it's no way. Egotistical, yes. Dishonest, no.
Because I wanted to get the project done, and done well, I did accommodate to the best of my abilities. But part of this accommodation required that I warn everyone ahead of time that a disinclination for teamwork is part of my genes and personality. Naturally, I was met with the oft-heard admonition that "part of your education is learning how to deal with groups", presumably because "in real life we must all work well with others".
Horse puckey.
No, in "real life", we don't all have to work well with others. We all have our own ways of doing things. Some of us are more team-oriented than others. This has nothing to do with being a misanthropist. But it does have everything to do with knowing who you are and how you work best—and not feeling ashamed of that.
When our presentation was finally completed, my colleagues congratulated one another on "a job well done" and, not unexpectedly, rebuked me for not being a "team player". Even though I had done just as much work—if not more—than the others, not being a team player somehow translated into "not pulling my weight". Well, if that's the case, then thank goodness I didn't pull my proverbial weight—else I would have wasted a good eight hours trying to decide what colour paper would be most appropriate for our presentation handouts. But I digress.
My main point is that being a "team player" is, at best, a lofty, ill-defined ideal that, in the wrong hands, may do more harm than good to industry, efficiency, and creativity. Especially if it is seen by society as some sort of celestial trait that will enrich every group or solve every organisational concern—and if it is unilaterally forced upon individuals by groups of their peers—it will drive people not closer together, but farther apart.
Alas, as Lord Byron wrote in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind:
All are not fit with them to sir and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil.
Eddy Elmer is a psychology student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is most certainly not a team player.
* "Deconstructing the lone genius myth: Toward a contextual view of creativity", by Alfonso Mortuori and Ronald E. Purser. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Summer 1995.
Copyright © 2002, by Eddy M. Elmer
Permanent URL: http://www.eddyelmer.com/articles/teamsfu.htm