TEAM SPIRIT AND TEAMWORK
By Jorge Araújo
Team Work Consultores
It’s important to clarify the differences between Team Spirit and Teamwork. A team is a group of people who interact with each other in the service of common goals. It is made up of People (not Human Resources, much less Human Capital) who interact with each other, i.e. share information, support each other, care about each other and strive for common goals. Whenever necessary, they sacrifice their particular interests in the service of the collective objectives; which (often!) means sacrifice and even confrontation caused by continued openness with those who “don’t do what they have to do” for their Team.
Team Spirit, on the other hand, simply expresses the social climate that exists in teams, the personal relationships that exist. Here are some examples of the differences between Team Spirit and Teamwork. A dinner or lunch “favours” Team Spirit. A competitive and demanding training session, or a work session in which, “eye to eye”, each member of the team gives their opinion up front about the “relational and operational state” of the team, “enriches” Teamwork.
The most competitive team I coached had 2 or 3 players (the so-called “stars”) who simply didn’t speak to each other socially. But when they were training and competing, you couldn’t tell! Excellent professionals, they knew that they depended on each other to achieve the common goal contained in which they only won individual prizes if they “helped” the team to realize the objectives set at a collective level. They didn’t like each other personally. But they worked as a team because they knew they depended on each other.
In contrast, the least competitive team I worked with was a “group of friends”.
They showed great team spirit, but it was extremely difficult for any of their members to confront each other in the service of common goals. They “feared” hurting the susceptibility of their “friends”. They preserved the so-called “rotten peace”, typical of teams in which Team Spirit prevails to the detriment of Teamwork.
Let’s be clear!
In terms of high-performance sport or business, Teamwork means sacrifice, passion, here and there aggression capable of creating climates in which it’s not allowed (for anyone!) not to do what needs to be done.
In other words, if we’re talking about “building teams” capable of high levels of performance, it’s not a solution to create “cuddly”, “happy”, “smiling”, “comfortable” working environments.
In order for a high-performance team to “make the whole greater than the sum of its parts”, the WE must be de-opposed to the US! This means that a working environment needs to be mobilized in which individual sacrifice is dominant in the collective interest.
