If we need teams, why do we focus on individuals?

For long, human work has focused on problems so complex that collaboration is needed. Work itself can be viewed as interaction, of people solving each others’ problems, responding to others’ needs.

Today with the quick adoption of LLMs, many report staggering improvements of personal productivity. In science for instance, novel AI tools can significantly speed up analysis and writing, which has exacerbated the bottlenecks of the peer review and publishing processes. 

Increases of personal productivity are, however, of no use if the outcomes do not reach and impact others. At work, no-one is truly productive alone. Currently, our methods for knowledge sharing, collaborative learning and interaction in the scientific community are too slow. The same is true of many other work organizations - reporting conventions, remote meetings, poorly used interaction tools make collective learning lag behind.   

In general, research shows that characteristics of interaction explain the differences between teams performance above and beyond the individual characteristics of team members. This means that personal characteristics do matter, e.g. according to a meta-analysis, individuals’ cognitive ability and emotional intelligence are predictors of team success, but most often team-level processes explain more than individual traits. If you are looking for ways to improve something, it makes sense to focus on the things that are actionable, and produce the biggest effects.

Collaborative phenomena that predict team success beyond individual traits include things like:

Trust

Cohesion

Shared mental models

Efficacy or potency (team-level belief in success)

Team performance can be shaped and affected by many things, with markers of interaction quality often overlooked

This research seems to contrast how popular individual measures are in work life. It is very common to develop teams by measuring things such as personality or behavioral types and roles, and then try to find the winning combination of these characteristics for team success. Understanding individual characteristics is useful, as they do predict team success and can also impact the quality of interaction: e.g. emotional intelligence and self efficacy have been connected to team cohesion. However, including interaction-level phenomena can significantly improve the effectiveness of team development.

So what? 

Collaboration can be measured and improved in many ways. For example, a great first step for leaders is to try and switch the viewpoint from the individual brains in the team to what takes place between them. 

How would you characterize the level of trust and cohesion in the team? 

How would the team members describe the quality of collaboration? 

The importance of interaction is reflected in how people reminisce about work. When people describe the teams they have been part of during their careers, they may recount individual differences, but more often what was shared, whether good or bad: “We were an outstanding team”, “Everyone had each others’ back”, “We were all on the same wavelength, in perfect sync”, or, “We fought a lot”, ”The atmosphere made me hate my job”, “We were competing against each other, no one helped anyone else”. 

What is shared has the most impact.