Why teams are even put together in the first place. You've heard the saying "if you want something done right, do it yourself." There are reasons why you might not want to do it yourself.
#1 The More Resources You Deploy The More Quality And Faster Results You Get
One of the most obvious reasons to have a team is because there's an idea that the more resources that you throw at something, resources being;
• More people,
• More eyeballs,
• More man-hours,
• More diverse skill sets, etc.,
We can accomplish something at a higher quality or faster. You know that's not necessarily true.
You've probably worked on teams where having more people or more time or more skills actually made things slower or lower quality or even caused the failure of the final product. But we do like to think that if we add more resources, then we can have something better.
#2 Synergy
Another reason why teams are put together is the idea of synergy. I know a lot of people don't like this buzz word “Synergy”, I love it. The idea of synergy is that you take two things, add them together, and you get more than the sum of the two things. In this case, the value of one person paired with another person is bigger than just those two. Working together they create more than two.
#3 To train other people
From a management and leadership perspective, one of the big reasons why you would use teams is to train other people. For example, if you put a cross-functional team together, not just developers, but maybe people from the marketing team, what happens is the developers understand marketing better, and the marketers understand development better.
That cross-training helps people understand the organization better and maybe understand the motives behind different departments. An example like that can also help strengthen the culture of an organization. Putting people together on a team that might not otherwise have ever worked together or even crossed paths in the hallway, having them solve problems together can strengthen relationships to lead to a more unified organization.
#4 When more people work on a product they work through the challenges
Another reason why teams bring value is that when more people work on a product they work through the challenges, they talk about the issues, they come up with solutions, and they implement those solutions, those people are more bought into the final product. They're even bought into the issues that the product is trying to resolve. You can imagine the ownership that those people have in the problems and solutions.
Understanding why teams are put together is of utmost importance to the upward movement of any organization.
Thanks for reading.
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