Doing Away With The Individual Contributor
Discussing an article from a few years back about “The five keys to a successful Google team”, I posed the question: do individual contributors have any responsibility for maintaining the team’s health?
I hadn’t even finished asking the question when the answer dawned on me.
No.
Of course not. Not when phrased that way.
Individual contributor.
You’re alone. Individual. Isolated. A loan wolf. You’re not responsible for a team, you’re not responsible for other people, you’re responsible for making contributions on your own, in a silo, and not getting distracted by whatever else is happening on the team.
That’s bullshit. If I had an actual individual contributor like this on my team, I would want them gone.
A team is more than just the individual members; every relationship, every connection that exists between two or more members, is an aspect of the team’s gestalt. A member who acts in isolation breaks those connections and diminishes the team.
We’re not individual contributors. We’re cogs in the machine. We’re members of the pack. We’re parts of a greater whole. Use whatever analogy or metaphor you want, just stop saying individual contributor.
The original question — who should be empowered to, and who should be accountable for, improving and maintaining team health — is still really important and really interesting, but out of scope for this post. It’s a topic I’ll be thinking about and discussing more, and likely posting about in the future. Comments on this are welcome =)
