An article among the free stories from the Wall Street Journal, Teamwork Raises Everyone's Game, documents what we’ve known all along: “that the way people work together is important for an endeavor's success -- even in fields thought of as dominated by individual "stars."�
Researchers looked at an individual surgeons’ performance at different hospitals and concluded that “most of the time, patients did better in the hospital where their surgeon performed more operations.� The conclusion was that a surgical team that frequently worked together was more effective than a star surgeon operating with people he wasn't as familiar with. Other studies documented the performance of the “star� and his team in financial analysis and basketball. A final anecdote chronicles the success of a small manufacturer that increased profits ostensibly by making the engineers sit next to the marketers. More communication among the team members yields a better final product.
Why is this so easy to understand and so hard to do? And I'm not talking about the "stars" that keep information to themselves. I mean the people who believe in the team concept, but who just can't make it work.
Think of how many critical bits of information you've found by accident. Or the info that would have been key to your project had you discovered it two weeks ago. Or how you could have prevented a colleague from pursuing a dead end had you known. Technology increases the amount of communication but not the quality. Meetings? We don't need any more. Maybe it's time to switch seats.
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