The Magic of Many

There has been extensive research and writing on the value of teams, whole being greater than parts, and the beauty of synergy. What an individual can achieve in most instances is multiplied many folds if he is a part of a well-functioning team.

Although being in a high performance team is not a very frequent occurrence, especially if accountability is fuzzy, anyone who has tasted the experience will vouch for the impetus it provides to the final output.

The idea of ‘collectiveness’ is so strong that it extends well beyond the boundaries of the corporate world. A careful look around would expose us to these umpteen instances of people coming together, formally or informally, because they realize the advantages of working from a collective whole.

‘Being in it together’ is a real powerful phrase that helps individuals overcome intimidating mental blocks. There are myriad support groups that enable one to effectively achieve goals like destroying wasteful habits and reinforcing ‘positive addictions’. Anyone who has ever taken a group exercise class can understand the ease of sweating and working hard for sixty minutes when there is a collective huffing and puffing vs. repeating the same all by yourself- lest you have oodles of determination and self discipline a lone soldier might just not go the whole way. There is an interesting group that I read about called ‘Girls Gotta Move’ that helps you find running partners for you to re-fuel the motivation when you are faced with exercise burnouts. There are stories of people hooking up with their biking or running partners over the phone if physical presence is infeasible, providing them inspiration to go that extra mile, literally. There are communities of self-minded individuals that come together to generate unprecedented energies- like collective yoga gatherings or joining hands across geography for raising awareness on different issues. Community gatherings, support systems, SIGs of Special Interest Groups are just some of the examples that emphasize the thought that two heads are certainly better than one.

During some of my reading on the idea of collectiveness I came across few simple but effective ways for very large groups of people to come together and deliver great outcomes. Since most of us are a part of a tacit or explicit team, the new found believer of teams in me overwhelmingly wants to share some of these ways to leverage the power of a group.

Let’s take the instance where we need to come up with a statement as a team that serves as a proposition or has to fulfill a similar function. Writing this collectively could be a nightmare and hence is informally delegated to one member who drafts the proposition, while the rest critique and improvise. How it can be done with equal contribution from all is by posting everyone’s statement on a chart paper and providing each person with different color dots that can stick to the chart. Each team member goes around reading everyone else’s statements and sticks a dot on the phrase that he thinks is powerful in the sentence. At the end of the process the team picks up the phrases that receive the maximum dots and synergizes them into a complete proposition that has the equal essence of each member’s thought.

Another situation where team work can be unwieldy is collective decision-making in very large groups. This can be made seamless by beginning with many small groups that discuss the idea individually. They then elect one spokesperson to put their chain of thoughts in front of the original big group. Say there are nine small groups formed. The discussion table will have ten chairs, nine occupied by the respective spokespersons while the tenth left vacant for the other members of individual groups who have anything to add. The protocol must be they should occupy the empty chair, speak about the relevant point and vacate the chair. This way decision making and strategizing can be transformed from a clumsy, arbitrary process to a smooth procedure that can boast of possessing equal voice, irrespective of the size of the group.

I had all along been a self-proclaimed victim of dysfunctional teams with social loafers and hence was perennially dumped with most of the task. Though somewhere inside me I patted myself for being the martyr, little did I realize that I am unconsciously destroying the huge benefits that a team of equals have the capacity to achieve. There are innumerable innovative ways we can ‘feed on each other’s energy’ and deliver excellence. So the next time you are tempted to jump in and take over all the tasks and decision making in a team because you have branded the collectiveness as dysfunctional, think again because as Sir George Lewis said

“If the mass of the community breaks up into individualities, by social discord, there is an end to the facility arising from collectiveness of action.”