chapter 3

Individual Needs vs. Team Needs

Besides differing in degrees of teaming instinct, people on teams differ in terms of personal agendas. We make a big deal out of team objectives. Team objectives are supposed to be powerful visions that unite the members of a team and drive them on irresistibly to success.

But guess what—in teaming physics, the team objective is decidedly the weak force. The strong force remains the collection of personal wishes and wants that team members bring to the team.

Just because we are attracted to teaming up doesn’t mean we set our other desires on the shelf. We don’t know about you, but we’ll be doggoned if we’ll forsake our personal dreams for the sake of some workgroup.

So a conflict exists between individual team members’ goals and the overarching goal of the team itself.

And it can play out very painfully. Imagine a team of four, with the acknowledged goal of creating an e-commerce site for a conventional business—let’s say consumer gardening supplies. The goal is simple: reengineer a local business to cyberspace.

The four team members are Doug, a freelance programmer; Edie, an in-house graphic designer; Miller, an outsider brought in to help develop a catalog; and Avram, an old-guard sales engineer with major ESOP holdings in the business this project will some day supplant.

Sounds workable. But the four people aren’t stick figures. They each have an agenda that is subtly pulling the team apart.

Doug is upset because he has a program from a previous job that he feels would be fine for this job, with a few minor alterations. His agenda is to finish his part of the project and get on to the next one. Frankly, he needs the money. But his teammates won’t give him the go-ahead to do this.

Edie is usually a good sport on teams, redoing work at their request. But Edie has a secret. She’s going to have a baby in seven months. It’s too early to tell everyone—she doesn’t want to count her chicken until it’s hatched. But her mind is on that baby, and the project just doesn’t do much for her. Her best design so far has been a garden page featuring characters from Peter Rabbit.

Miller thinks he’s God’s gift to catalog consulting. His taste in teamwork is to come in every day with a new plan, a major overhaul, a fresh vision. He’s driving everyone crazy. People don’t know this, but Miller is a recovering alcoholic going through a manic period. He’s having the time of his life, getting interested in his career just as others are easing out of theirs.

Avram is the Mustache Pete of the team. He helped start the company years ago, and he has reservations about the whole Internet thing. He read something in the paper, a year ago, that no one is making money there. It was his last fresh insight. Secretly, he resents the bright but uncommitted youngsters around him, and lapses into frequent lectures on the virtue of selling garden supplies off the back of a pickup truck. He feels unappreciated, and his lectures are a misguided effort to show people what is inside him.

We’ve just described four decent, talented people who are not in any way opposed to working on teams, and have nothing major against one another. But there are numerous conflicts between their individual goals and the team goal, and these conflicts will only build in significance.

They probably won’t ever blow up, or go ballistic, or melt down into headline dysfunctionality. But they’ll never gel as a team, and they won’t meet their goals in a timely fashion, and the website will be a joke, because their team goals were deep-sixed by a raft of unfulfilled personal goals.

Doug, Edie, Miller, and Avram are just not going to click. Not for lack of good intentions. But their good intentions, taken together, are a feeble force compared to their individual, unaddressed needs.

Rebalancing the Load

Effective teamwork means a continual balancing act between meeting team needs and individual needs. We’re not just talking here about the basic human need for survival through affiliation with others that we discussed in the last chapter. We are speaking of all the things that each of us wants, things that have nothing to do with teams or jobs.

While it’s nice to be around other folks and work with them, we are, all of us, still looking out for Number One. Forget all the movie scenes of the scrappy doughboy jumping on a live grenade to save his buddies in uniform. In real life, we take actions with others primarily to satisfy our own personal agendas. People will only agree to team if it meets their own needs first.

Of course, there are some of us who live for deferred gratification as a masochistic kick, who may agree to work toward a team outcome now in exchange for some personal outcomes later on. These people happily forestall today’s druthers in order to incur payback tomorrow.

But, in general, it’s a “me first,” or at least a “please consider my needs while we meet the team’s,” kind of world.

Find the Agenda

“Good soldiers” are sometimes not soldiers at all. Teams must be leery of members who have no honest intention to be working members of the team. In their hearts, they may be saying:

“I’m not here to work with the team, but to take credit for its successes.”

“I’m not here to work with the team, but to associate with some of its members.”

“I’m not here to work with the team, but to use it as a steppingstone to better things.”

The term “hidden agenda” was coined to describe this kind of covert careerism. It is not honest and it is very destructive to team coherence. Good team members recognize that in order to build trust, they must uncover their own hidden agendas and expose them to the light of day.

In our hypothetical team, everyone has to put their agendas on the table for the others to examine.

Edie, Miller, and Avram need to be apprised of Doug’s frustration. Chances are they will empathize with his need to finish up and move on, and move more quickly. Perhaps, with their empathy under his belt, Doug will relax a bit and let the project find its own rhythm.

Even if Edie does not tell Doug, Miller, and Avram about her pregnancy, she needs to communicate to them that something is cooking that is pulling her from the work. It’s possible that she isn’t the best person for the team, and she may have to be replaced. Hey, it happens.

Miller needs to be told that he’s making people crazy. It doesn’t have to be cruel. Telling Miller why others are ambivalent about the project should engage him, and modulate his excesses. It wouldn’t hurt for them to learn why he’s so excited, either—it’s much bigger than a love of catalog sales.

And Avram—poor Avram—needs to open up and respect his teammates more. He’s so connected to the company of ten years ago that it prevents him from being here now in a useful way. He should tell his story, and then he should shut up. One lesson of teaming is that one is never too old to grow up.

Only by processing through each team member’s wishes and wants, and at the very minimum acknowledging their validity, can the group redirect its focus—which has suddenly grown more intense and deep with knowledge—at the team goal.

And make the best damn gardening supplies website the world ever saw.

Who is to say that the team mission is the only mission a team can acknowledge and pursue? Deep down, most of us are not especially good soldiers, and we do not long to subordinate our own desires to the common good. Live grenades do not get leaped on routinely.

On the contrary: sacrifice, loyalty, and the willingness to go through a little hell for one another occur only when cards are on the table, and people are allowed (and required) to be honest about their needs.

Personal goals that prevent us from achieving team goals are often very honorable:

having a baby

spending more time with family

seeking a better job after this one

going back to school and getting that degree

Or they can be a shade less edifying:

making a name for oneself

joining a team that is clearly funded

wanting to belong to a team of “winners” for a change

wanting a group that one can dominate

glomming onto a team that has already achieved successes

hiding behind a powerful executive’s support and championship

Whatever the personal goals, we need to know what they are and to deal with them or at least acknowledge them as a team—perhaps even to make them corollary team goals. When we know our fellow team members want us to achieve what we ourselves want, that is a terrific bond between members.

The sooner we know one another’s personal needs and hopes, the better for the team. This doesn’t mean that personal needs have to be completely met first before true teaming can get underway. It does mean that acknowledging and addressing these needs as a group, early on, can help prevent our “selfish” desires from sinking the team effort.