There's No “i” in Team

 What it is this statement meant to do:

To help people understand that they can perform better when working as a team and taking the views of other team members into consideration. 

Executive Summary (of the reality of this statement):

A telling off for anyone brave enough to show some initiative and do something that the boss didn’t tell you to do. Daring to have an opinion. Disagreeing with the boss.

The detail of this statement in use:

Attempting to locate the source of this statement is quite a challenge because almost every manager and, more appropriately, management consultant, has used the term, but all would deny it. But, if they hadn’t used the term it wouldn’t be as well known.

Some people work better in teams, some work better alone, not everyone appreciates how important it is to work in a team when in business, almost every type of business requires team work, almost everybody would benefit from working in a team and almost every team is made up of individual characters.

The term has been used a gentle reminder to team members that others have some value too. A reminder that a team can only perform to its peak performance when we all work together towards a common goal, optimising performance of the individual by working as a team.

I was a manager of project managers at one time and during a particularly fraught team meeting, desperately trying to get them to manage their projects in some standard sort of way, so that I could plan and prioritise the project portfolio. Back to the story, well, I was getting more than a little frustrated with the constant excuses why they couldn’t comply with my perfectly reasonable request to standardise. 

I said it, “THERE IS NO i IN TEAM”

They looked at me in horror, stopped them dead in their tracks, they were dumbstruck.

Then one of them replied:

“There’s no F in team either”

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