“Every time I hear this cliché about people being most valuable resource I wonder: how the heck can you say people are most valuable when you treat them as resource? As commodity. As something which can be replaced with another identical um… resource. If you say that, you basically deny that people in your organization are important.”

I’m in agreement with Pawel on this point, but I’d go further. Not only is a statement like ‘People are our most valuable resource’ degrading and counter productive, even if you restate it as ‘Nothing is more important than our people’ it’s still incorrect. The real value had nothing to do with people and everything to do with teams.

The key thing that a team provides is a means to align the goals of its members. These goals need not be for the greater good of humanity, in fact they’re generally much more mundane. It really doesn’t matter who wins the world cup* or whether project omega will ship by next Tuesday, all that matters is that the team succeeds in its common goal. A group all pulling in the same direction is orders of magnitude more effective than that same group working as individuals – a business cannot be successful without effective teams.

The trouble is the word ‘team’ is massively over used, it’s a buzzword that has become so ubiquitous we don’t even notice it. The tendency to assemble a group of disparate people and label them as a ‘team’ devalues the concept. One area where this is especially true is that of ‘The Management Team’, generally comprised of middle management peers from various disciplines this group often have very little in common in terms of shared goals and identity.

And here lies the problem, if management is unused to working in a team themselves, then the value of a team is less visible. Furthermore, since it is generally individuals, not the team as a whole, who complete the component tasks the team effect is not obvious from afar.

I don’t think you’ll find an organisation that is anti team, simply that it’s hard prioritise the tasks necessary to encourage team formation when the value of teams is poorly understood. It’s easy to measure the cost of co-location but much harder to measure the benefit to the co-located team, hence the true value of the team is passed over.

Not only are ‘people are not our most valuable resource’, people aren’t our most valuable anything just on their own, it’s all about teams.

[In this post I’ve purposely avoided the subject of how to form a team. It turns out that it’s quite tricky, I’d recommend Peopleware as a good place to start.]

* Except if it’s England of course.