How Corporations Misuse Teammwork

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Teamwork is a concept that has been co-opted by America's corporate culture in order to let a large group of people other than the person ultimately responsible for failure take the blame while the same person takes the credit when all goes well. But the use of teamwork in America's corporate culture today is just one way that perpetuates the sole crushing spirit of the business environment.

And this is yet another example of how the message is getting out there, I am not the first person to point out this out to corporations, "hey guys, you've got this wrong." Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert strip makes a daily living doing it, yet corporations are comfortably ignoring the problems and get away with pretending the strip is not about their company.

The first lesson that will change the corporate culture is calling your employees part of a team does not make it seem like they are not doing work. Yes, your employees may often work together to accomplish the same goals but teamwork means something a little more than corporations try to get it to mean. There is also a sense of camaraderie when someone is part of a team. All employees have in common at most corporations other than the soul crushing atmosphere provided by corporate culture.

Yet corporate culture has tried to co-opt teamwork in order to get employees to work more closely together. This not only fails to understand human nature but is yet another buzzword and an attempt to make everyone conform to whatever bland grayness the company a person works for happens to prefer.

Those responsible for adding teamwork as a corporate concept should be ashamed of themselves if they are not already, but they are probably, like the person I have criticized throughout this series, proud of the work they did integrating Mormon beliefs into corporate culture (whether this is what they knew they were doing or not), and found it convenient to shift the blame away from them and let the peons take the blame for failure because they weren't being team players.

The problem is not with the idea with teamwork, but how corporations use it. Much like the Mormon faith, the idea is that people can never be good enough. Criticism has its place as a corporate environment, but it should never be used to spread blame out among all the people as it usually is.

Corporations need to drop the idea of teamwork as they use it, it has it place but on a ball field. Instead, they must learn to recognized people as individuals and value them as such rather than trying to treat them as insects. People are not insects and never will be regardless of how useful it may be for corporate culture to treat them that way.