{"id":675,"date":"2011-04-25T20:24:43","date_gmt":"2011-04-25T19:24:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/?p=675"},"modified":"2011-04-25T20:24:43","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T19:24:43","slug":"teams-are-not-our-most-valuable-resource-a-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/2011\/04\/25\/teams-are-not-our-most-valuable-resource-a-response\/","title":{"rendered":"People are not our most valuable resource – a response"},"content":{"rendered":"
Pawel Brodzinski<\/a> recently wrote a post entitled \u2018People are not our most valuable resource<\/a>\u2019 the point being that people aren\u2019t resources at all , they\u2019re people and should be treated as such.<\/div>\n

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\u201cEvery time I hear this clich\u00e9 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\u2026 resource. If you say that, you basically deny that people in your organization are important.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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I\u2019m in agreement with Pawel on this point, but I\u2019d go further. Not only is a statement like \u2018People are our most valuable resource\u2019 degrading and counter productive, even if you restate it as \u2018Nothing is more important than our people\u2019 it\u2019s still incorrect. The real value had nothing to do with people and everything to do with teams.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re generally much more mundane. It really doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The trouble is the word \u2018team\u2019 is massively over used, it\u2019s a buzzword<\/a> that has become so ubiquitous we don\u2019t even notice it. The tendency to assemble a group of disparate people and label them as a \u2018team\u2019 devalues the concept. One area where this is especially true is that of \u2018The Management Team\u2019, generally comprised of middle management peers from various disciplines this group often have very little in common in terms of shared goals and identity.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll find an organisation that is anti team, simply that it\u2019s hard prioritise the tasks necessary to encourage team formation when the value of teams is poorly understood. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Not only are \u2018people are not our most valuable resource\u2019, people aren\u2019t our most valuable anything just on their own, it\u2019s all about teams.<\/p>\n

[In this post I\u2019ve purposely avoided the subject of how to form a team. It turns out that it\u2019s quite tricky, I\u2019d recommend Peopleware<\/a> as a good place to start.]<\/p>\n

* Except if it\u2019s England of course.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pawel Brodzinski recently wrote a post entitled \u2018People are not our most valuable resource\u2019 the point being that people aren\u2019t resources at all , they\u2019re people and should be treated as such.   \u201cEvery time I hear this clich\u00e9 about people being most valuable resource I wonder: how the heck can you say people are […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[44],"class_list":{"0":"post-675","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-management","7":"tag-team","8":"h-entry","9":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}