Here is a thought that is exactly one blog long:
Now that I am a few years into being a faculty member and I begin to compare it to the other small group work that I have done — acting, singing, raiding — the following thing strikes me:
Academics are very good at doing community. We all know we need it — feedback on our work, colleagues who work on shared areas of specialties, the cash bar at conferences. We extol virtues like collegiality, time donated for peer review and so forth.
At the same time, most academics (or maybe just those without labs) are not very familiar with teamwork. Working together, in a small group, over a prolonged period to solve a problem is not something we are used to. Like some sort of Durkheimian fantasy of aborigines, we wander amongst our classes and our students, coming together only for the occasional effervescent conference. But we rarely spend that much time in the same room with each other. And the one institution which does mandate problem solving together — the faculty meeting — is also notorious as the time when professors Behave Badly.
I don’t know if I’m right that professors are good at teamwork and bad at community, or if it would matter one way or the other, but it does seem to me that there is a noticeable difference between the work required to teach a class versus that required to, say, run a rehearsal.
My personal experience – in and out of academics – is that so-called “teamwork” is largely dependent upon the unflagging leadership of one or two extremely dedicated individuals.
It may be worth drawing a distinction between situations that require teamwork (theatrical performance, musical ensembles, sports teams, or advertising, for example) and conditions that affect successful teamwork. From my experience in advertising, I would agree with Kerim that successful teamwork is usually dependent upon the quality of team leaders and that uncommon persistence is one key attribute.
A closer look, however, may reveal that other attributes very in importance depending on the situation in question. I am, serendipitously, reading a volume edited by Maki Jun, one of Japan’s most famous advertising creatives, in which Maki and 19 other renowned creative directors offer their individual views on the art of constructing successful teams. In his introduction to the volume, Maki suggests that, while traditional, military-style hierarchies served Japanese industry well during postwar reconstruction, they no longer function well in a world in which software and innovation are the primary sources of value. In itself, this suggestion is not new. Former head of Japan’s Economic Planning Agency offered a similar observation more than a decade ago that I cited in my book on Japanese consumer behavior. What Maki adds is the suggestion that other industries should have a look at advertising, where creation of project teams striving to produce innovation has a long history.