Over at Creating Passionate Users is a very good look at why one would want to be a passopmate employee rather than one who follows the team flow. It got me thinking.

We’ve all heard of ‘go with the flow’ and ‘be a team player’ but when does being a team player actually make the team worse off?

The courses on organizational behaviour that I’ve taken have shown me over and over again that great success can be achieved in teams. But the caveat was that the team was made up of people with very different opinions and backgrounds. People from tech, from marketing, from the executive pool and from the day to day workers. Why is this innovative? Why did it work? Because it stopped group think. When you are in a big group of people just like you or similar to you, say a whole bunch of Canadian-born, male, MBAs… you are more than likely to get a homogenous set of ideas from a group with less diversity. It’s simple.

“Team thinking leads to incremental improvements, and prevents revolutionary ideas.” link

So, how does being a passionate individual help the team? It ignites a spark. If you play the devil’s advocate, take a stand, take the lead – others may very much disagree. And this is good. Disagreement is the best way to avoid making the wrong choice because it means that you must examine your choice more closely. Being a passionate individual as a part of the team also means that YOU will be more satisfied. You will know you actually participated in making that decision. There is no reason for you to sumbit who you are to be a part of a team. The team is there, as noted, to support the creation of passionate users as a team.

“The team’s role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives.” link

How do you stay passionate in the presence of conflict? As the post goes on to say, there is a big gap between what a company wants and what it does in its management practices. Leadership, oh yeah, that’s what we want. But you must do x, x, x, x, and x first. The reality of fostering leadership and innovation are not easy. What manager wants to be challenged? And what “good” “cohesive” group wants to be broken apart by that “lone wolf” over there?

I say, what is the point of a team if you all think the same. Lay off the team and let one person do the job then. You see my point.