Cover and Move.

‘Cover and move’ describes the tactic soldiers use to advance (or withdraw) through a battlefield or hostile space.

One soldier directs suppressive fire towards the enemy, forcing them to keep their heads down, while another soldier moves across open ground. Once the soldier has reached safety, they provide suppressive fire allowing the other soldier to join them. Each solider relies on the other to achieve their objective, leap-frogging via cover and move.

It’s a simple example of teamwork. Yet like all good teamwork, it’s selfish.

Each solider uses the other to advance further than the soldier could alone.

The individuality of each solider is literally preserved (they don’t die) and enhanced (they move towards their objective) by covering the other soldier.

‘Teamwork’ is another word for regression to the lowest common denominator. You join a team, and are forced to listen to every opinion, wait your turn, and slow down to the pace of the slowest or most disengaged member. Your skills and expertise are diluted as you are forced to integrate with, or at least indulge, other team members’ skills. You become stuck in a traffic jam of mediocrity.

Your only escape is to become a ‘leader’.

No.

Teams should only be formed, and people forced to join them, if each person’s skills will be enhanced by achieving the team’s objective. A person should not be included in a team without evidence of this. There is no ‘must’ in ‘team’.

Lazy or incompetent people love teams because they can hide in, or behind them. They contribute little or nothing to the team. Or they use the work of the team to explain why they have not done their job. Bad bosses use teams as alibis for their failure to execute.

If discovered, the lazy or inompetent person can rely on the misguided kindness of at least one team member to ‘support’ them, further depleting the team. It’s like a crack combat unit carrying a wounded soldier on a stretcher.

Teams are mostly formed for administrative convenience to serve the needs of HR or accountants or a boss who needs followers to justify their position or salary.

Sometimes it’s just geography. A group of people share an office or building or floor or cluster of cubicles, and so they are a ‘team’. A team needs a leader, and thus one is appointed, further reinforcing and calcifying an artificial construct.

Teams are rarely the result of someone carefully selecting skills that allow a person to cover and move.

Teams are another example of how most organisations herd racehorses and race sheep.