Organizational Design
Cooperation and Teamwork
We optimize each person for their own role — clear tasks, clear accountability, clear metrics — and end up with a team of excellent individuals who quietly stop caring whether anyone beside them succeeds. The very things we do to improve performance can engineer the failure of the team.
To raise performance and efficiency, we have learned to lean on three things: clarity, accountability, and measurement. Each one sounds unarguable. Together, they can quietly engineer the failure of the very team they were meant to improve.
We start with clarity. We define each role and each task precisely, so everyone becomes a specialist. And it works in its way — people focus on their patch, learn it deeply, get better at their defined tasks.
Then accountability. Someone has to own the performance of each process, and within each process, someone has to own each task. Clean lines, no ambiguity about who answers for what.
And once tasks are clearly defined and accountability is enforced, we measure — because we believe that what gets measured gets done. So we measure each person against their own clearly defined tasks and responsibilities.
Here is where it turns. To improve their personal numbers, people pour their effort into their own tasks, and start protecting themselves against scrutiny. Each one moves toward being a perfect individual — and in doing so, builds a team destined to fail. Few of them care much what happens to the person beside them. They are not accountable for each other’s success. They are not measured against it. They may not even know what their teammate is responsible for. We optimized every part, and starved the thing that connects them.
This is the paradox Yves Morieux, of BCG’s Institute for Organization, lays out in his talk As Work Gets More Complex, 6 Rules to Simplify — that the harder we tune each individual for performance, the more we erode the cooperation the whole actually runs on.