I agree with your list of drawbacks of teamwork for the worker, and find useful wording them as a tax. But, despite hating to have to pay that tax, I do find joy in teamwork!
Your list of benefits for the business is, to me, also a list of benefits for the individuals. I am also an introvert, but I do enjoy shared learning, shared goals, being by the side of people that do stuff I would not be knowledgeable or daring to do... And I have never felt scammed by the fact that an organization expected teamwork.
A shared accomplishment brings me more joy than an individual accomplishment, and I suspect that I not alone. To me, there is comfort in minimizing teamwork, but also definitely less joy.
Hi Jurgen, I have to be honest, I like this article, but I don't like to admit. But I have an image in my mind right now. Just a frame, the moment when Max Verstappen comes into the pit-lane for a pit-stop. How many people are working around him? How many people are a team, how many are a group? Is he a solo performer or is he a team with his engineer? I think this image is somehow what organizations have in mind putting together professionals for IT initiatives, but it sounds like a bias. Don't you think?
Lately, I've been doing just as you described. Building tools, writing things down, thinking a lot. After 25 years of leading teams and clients, I realize how much coordination tax _I_ was paying, and how that tax resulted it so much lower quality outputs delivered so much later than it needed to be. As you suggest, the AI is eager to help. Quick. Competent. What a breath of fresh air. I get to translate _my_ vision into reality at the quality and time that I choose.
LOL! I’m on team that is 99.9% me and the small bit divided among 5 other people. Oh, I so get your story! But while I think the project is worthwhile, and I don’t even mind doing the work, I can’t figure out how to dump the others (we’ve all been picked to do this project as volunteers with no pay). So, your story gives me if not hope, at least I understand a little bit more why I hate this and maybe that will prevent it from driving me crazy. So, thanks. :)
Very thoughtful piece, and I agree with much of it. I have a different perspective to offer, though -- what about the non-profit or mission-based organization? If my primary goal as a human is to achieve a goal that is a social good of some kind, not to turn a profit for myself, then perhaps teamwork is a great approach. In that case, I pay the "tax" of teamwork in order to see my impact amplified through the organization and team!
Even in the for-profit sector, there is a benefit to modern, salaried team work -- consistency. The Solo Chief typically only earns when he or she works and makes a profit. The salaried team worker gets paid whether they have a good or poor week. It reminds me of investing. Bond investors do not historically get the returns of stock investors, but they get predictability of income. That is a normal financial trade off. The lower salaries paid to people that work on teams is perhaps like the consistent coupon paid to bond holders, while the variable, potentially-higher compensation for solo chiefs are perhaps like the market-based returns paid to stock holders.
Food for thought. I would love to hear your responses.
Valid points. With a stable income, disconnected from the outcomes, there is less incentive to care about the teamwork. And yes, caring about an organization's purpose is something different. But who cares about selling widgets for a profit?
I sometimes feel that teamwork, corporate culture, values and et cetera are, in 99% of cases, languages invented by employers to organize people more efficiently. Tools. Instruments. And as always, whoever pays orders the music.
In that sense, solo work feels more honest.
And small teams can feel more honest too, but only if the conditions of real teamwork are met: equal ownership, equal responsibility, equal share in outcomes. Without that, it’s just structured asymmetry dressed up as culture.
This is a very interesting piece. Provocative, but well argued.
Teamwork, as we used to think of it, is broken - or at least its definition has been flawed from the beginning. We once believed that a team was a group of people who would help you if you failed to complete a task. In reality, a team is a group of people working together on a single project (in an abstract sense).
Consider a football team with different types of players. If the forward fails to fulfill his role, the other players cannot simply do it for him; the forward will be substituted. That whole process is what we call teamwork.
I believe true teamwork should be exactly like that: each person is responsible for his own actions, yet everyone is also accountable for ensuring that one’s failures do not harm the team.
This stance may evoke paranoia and trust issues, but if managed properly, it is possible to maintain a healthy, long‑term environment for everyone in the team—albeit a somewhat Machiavellian way of operating.
On the other hand, teamwork can also be structured so that helping teammates is mandatory, and these obligations become part of the team's core. A good example of this is a special‑forces unit, where a strong decision‑making hierarchy is essential, yet ability of individual responsibility is a core.
Without a hierarchy and without internal obligations shared among all members, an informal team becomes weak and can feel like a scam. Imagine a racing crew where one mechanic refuses to perform a tire change because he is in a bad mood or has a broken finger; such incidents make the entire team experience feel unreliable.
So when we say that a team is a scam, it’s at least because, in our usual jobs, real teams rarely exist. People aren’t taught how to work as a team; there is no formal learning process, and no one truly understands what teamwork means. Yet everyone has its own definition of a team. In that environment it’s no wonder that no proper team structure is possible. If there is no process for initiating a team, there will be no team at all.
Thank you for this eye opening article! I wasn't aware of the distinction between groups and teams. People often consider me as a team player, but I realize that I am only motivated and successful if there is something in for me beyond "being on a great agile team". I'm not weird, it's just my (normal, human) monkey-brain. Thx for this insight.
For me that means when forming groups for projects (we usually name "teams"), that means we should consider more the individual goals.
I feel everything in this diagnosis is right. The scam is real. But I think the scam is not teamwork it's the authority structure underneath it. Shared backlog, shared cadence, shared restroom. Individual performance review, individual salary, individual promotion. That contradiction is not a bug in how teams are managed. It is the whole design. The organisation gets collective intelligence, individuals gets individual accountability. I believe shared leadership is the attempt to close that gap to make the rewards as distributed as the effort. Most organisations never try it because it requires leaders to hold power differently and that is the harder problem.
People are always, always hired and evaluated individually, not collectively. If hiring and evaluation happened collectively as a team, they would as already be a separate one-team business and wouldn't even be employees. And that just moves the issue one step further: how is that one-team business organized? How do they hire and evaluate their team members.
Fair point regarding the legal and contractual nature of employment at the end of the day, an individual signs the offer letter. I feel my argument remains focused on the output side of that equation.
While we are hired as individuals, our professional success is rarely achieved in a vacuum. If the evaluation process doesn’t account for how an individual enhances or diminishes the collective performance, it misses the very reason they were hired in the first place. Perhaps the case is less about collectivism and more about using systemic thinking to truly understand performance?
In my line of work with various tech companies, I help companies create, and have seen, team based vetos, peer based ranking, and team OKRs used effectively to bridge this gap. I personally manage teams as squads and evaluate their performance as a group, and individually, because that is, in my opinion, where the value is actually created.
I believe you form a team when the goal (defined as an outcome or impact) can’t realistically be achieved by one person. What’s shifting now is that some of those constraints are disappearing, so at least “why a big team?” becomes a first-order question again, not a default assumption.
This really resonates with me as an introvert as well. As soon as you are the only one having some "expert" knowledge required to solve a specific problem and the others in the team are clueless, you're in the best position for suffering. I then rather sit on my own and do it alone while sipping some coffee. And there is nothing bad about it.
I thought it was "team work makes the dream work"?
In all seriousness, one of the main reasons I usually end up leaving LSE clients is the ratio of the alignment tax - especially when the amount of time spent in meetings starts to exceed the amount of time actually doing the work would have taken.
I agree with your list of drawbacks of teamwork for the worker, and find useful wording them as a tax. But, despite hating to have to pay that tax, I do find joy in teamwork!
Your list of benefits for the business is, to me, also a list of benefits for the individuals. I am also an introvert, but I do enjoy shared learning, shared goals, being by the side of people that do stuff I would not be knowledgeable or daring to do... And I have never felt scammed by the fact that an organization expected teamwork.
A shared accomplishment brings me more joy than an individual accomplishment, and I suspect that I not alone. To me, there is comfort in minimizing teamwork, but also definitely less joy.
Great to hear not everyone is the same. 🙂
Hi Jurgen, I have to be honest, I like this article, but I don't like to admit. But I have an image in my mind right now. Just a frame, the moment when Max Verstappen comes into the pit-lane for a pit-stop. How many people are working around him? How many people are a team, how many are a group? Is he a solo performer or is he a team with his engineer? I think this image is somehow what organizations have in mind putting together professionals for IT initiatives, but it sounds like a bias. Don't you think?
That's definitely a team. There are many kinds of teams. A solopreneur with ten AI agents is maybe also a team.
Lately, I've been doing just as you described. Building tools, writing things down, thinking a lot. After 25 years of leading teams and clients, I realize how much coordination tax _I_ was paying, and how that tax resulted it so much lower quality outputs delivered so much later than it needed to be. As you suggest, the AI is eager to help. Quick. Competent. What a breath of fresh air. I get to translate _my_ vision into reality at the quality and time that I choose.
Great to hear! Good for you. 👍🏻
LOL! I’m on team that is 99.9% me and the small bit divided among 5 other people. Oh, I so get your story! But while I think the project is worthwhile, and I don’t even mind doing the work, I can’t figure out how to dump the others (we’ve all been picked to do this project as volunteers with no pay). So, your story gives me if not hope, at least I understand a little bit more why I hate this and maybe that will prevent it from driving me crazy. So, thanks. :)
I feel for you!
Very thoughtful piece, and I agree with much of it. I have a different perspective to offer, though -- what about the non-profit or mission-based organization? If my primary goal as a human is to achieve a goal that is a social good of some kind, not to turn a profit for myself, then perhaps teamwork is a great approach. In that case, I pay the "tax" of teamwork in order to see my impact amplified through the organization and team!
Even in the for-profit sector, there is a benefit to modern, salaried team work -- consistency. The Solo Chief typically only earns when he or she works and makes a profit. The salaried team worker gets paid whether they have a good or poor week. It reminds me of investing. Bond investors do not historically get the returns of stock investors, but they get predictability of income. That is a normal financial trade off. The lower salaries paid to people that work on teams is perhaps like the consistent coupon paid to bond holders, while the variable, potentially-higher compensation for solo chiefs are perhaps like the market-based returns paid to stock holders.
Food for thought. I would love to hear your responses.
Valid points. With a stable income, disconnected from the outcomes, there is less incentive to care about the teamwork. And yes, caring about an organization's purpose is something different. But who cares about selling widgets for a profit?
I sometimes feel that teamwork, corporate culture, values and et cetera are, in 99% of cases, languages invented by employers to organize people more efficiently. Tools. Instruments. And as always, whoever pays orders the music.
In that sense, solo work feels more honest.
And small teams can feel more honest too, but only if the conditions of real teamwork are met: equal ownership, equal responsibility, equal share in outcomes. Without that, it’s just structured asymmetry dressed up as culture.
This is a very interesting piece. Provocative, but well argued.
Teamwork, as we used to think of it, is broken - or at least its definition has been flawed from the beginning. We once believed that a team was a group of people who would help you if you failed to complete a task. In reality, a team is a group of people working together on a single project (in an abstract sense).
Consider a football team with different types of players. If the forward fails to fulfill his role, the other players cannot simply do it for him; the forward will be substituted. That whole process is what we call teamwork.
I believe true teamwork should be exactly like that: each person is responsible for his own actions, yet everyone is also accountable for ensuring that one’s failures do not harm the team.
This stance may evoke paranoia and trust issues, but if managed properly, it is possible to maintain a healthy, long‑term environment for everyone in the team—albeit a somewhat Machiavellian way of operating.
On the other hand, teamwork can also be structured so that helping teammates is mandatory, and these obligations become part of the team's core. A good example of this is a special‑forces unit, where a strong decision‑making hierarchy is essential, yet ability of individual responsibility is a core.
Without a hierarchy and without internal obligations shared among all members, an informal team becomes weak and can feel like a scam. Imagine a racing crew where one mechanic refuses to perform a tire change because he is in a bad mood or has a broken finger; such incidents make the entire team experience feel unreliable.
So when we say that a team is a scam, it’s at least because, in our usual jobs, real teams rarely exist. People aren’t taught how to work as a team; there is no formal learning process, and no one truly understands what teamwork means. Yet everyone has its own definition of a team. In that environment it’s no wonder that no proper team structure is possible. If there is no process for initiating a team, there will be no team at all.
Thank you for this eye opening article! I wasn't aware of the distinction between groups and teams. People often consider me as a team player, but I realize that I am only motivated and successful if there is something in for me beyond "being on a great agile team". I'm not weird, it's just my (normal, human) monkey-brain. Thx for this insight.
For me that means when forming groups for projects (we usually name "teams"), that means we should consider more the individual goals.
You're just another monkey like all of us, scratching each other's backs! 🙂
This one hits home. When I think in terms of the "team tax"... I've been robbed. Highly motivating missive, thank you.
I feel everything in this diagnosis is right. The scam is real. But I think the scam is not teamwork it's the authority structure underneath it. Shared backlog, shared cadence, shared restroom. Individual performance review, individual salary, individual promotion. That contradiction is not a bug in how teams are managed. It is the whole design. The organisation gets collective intelligence, individuals gets individual accountability. I believe shared leadership is the attempt to close that gap to make the rewards as distributed as the effort. Most organisations never try it because it requires leaders to hold power differently and that is the harder problem.
People are always, always hired and evaluated individually, not collectively. If hiring and evaluation happened collectively as a team, they would as already be a separate one-team business and wouldn't even be employees. And that just moves the issue one step further: how is that one-team business organized? How do they hire and evaluate their team members.
No, collectivism is never the answer.
Fair point regarding the legal and contractual nature of employment at the end of the day, an individual signs the offer letter. I feel my argument remains focused on the output side of that equation.
While we are hired as individuals, our professional success is rarely achieved in a vacuum. If the evaluation process doesn’t account for how an individual enhances or diminishes the collective performance, it misses the very reason they were hired in the first place. Perhaps the case is less about collectivism and more about using systemic thinking to truly understand performance?
In my line of work with various tech companies, I help companies create, and have seen, team based vetos, peer based ranking, and team OKRs used effectively to bridge this gap. I personally manage teams as squads and evaluate their performance as a group, and individually, because that is, in my opinion, where the value is actually created.
100% agreement
I believe you form a team when the goal (defined as an outcome or impact) can’t realistically be achieved by one person. What’s shifting now is that some of those constraints are disappearing, so at least “why a big team?” becomes a first-order question again, not a default assumption.
Correct. What's the benefits are changing.
I think the throughput and some specialization benefits are shrinking. One person can ship more end-to-end.
This really resonates with me as an introvert as well. As soon as you are the only one having some "expert" knowledge required to solve a specific problem and the others in the team are clueless, you're in the best position for suffering. I then rather sit on my own and do it alone while sipping some coffee. And there is nothing bad about it.
Absolutely!
I thought it was "team work makes the dream work"?
In all seriousness, one of the main reasons I usually end up leaving LSE clients is the ratio of the alignment tax - especially when the amount of time spent in meetings starts to exceed the amount of time actually doing the work would have taken.
This happens more often than it should
Solo leveling is where the vision of who's who and what they're made of becomes clearer.