Teams: Refuge of the incompetent

Have you ever noticed that people who love to work in teams are generally those who aren't capable of getting stuff done on their own? Now, it's entirely possible that I've just ticked off all six of the people who are not related to me who read my blog. But hear me out, ok? (And let it be known that yes there are exceptions. These exceptions, however, are very rare.)

From the first moment you're enrolled in school you are jammed into groups and told to "work together". Sure, there are some positive reasons for this - it builds social skills, you can (sometimes) get more accomplished, you're exposed to other learning styles and other ways of doing things. These are all great things. However, by the time you've hit the 4th or 5th grade - you've learned everything positive there is to learn from a team environment. Now begins the long, wearying task of experiencing over and over all the negative aspects of team work.

First you get to experience the negatives of team sports. If you are the pudgy, geeky girl, you get to learn that, even though these people tell you their your friends, they're not going to pick you. It doesn't matter how good or bad you are at said sport - your very appearance predisposes everyone in class - including the gym teacher - against you. The team you finally get assigned to by the teacher will hate you and will do their darndest to make sure you don't actually ever get a chance to play the game. Oh, they'll let you on the team because they have no choice, but by golly, you will not be used.

However, these same people, when it comes time for an academic team will flock to try and be on your team. You're friends, right? And this is because they know that they can slack off and you, being the geeky girl, will pick up the slack because some educational moron has decided that you grade academic teams the same, regardless of individual effort (even though gym class is all individual and your grade doesn't suffer just because you got stuck with the class loser) and they know that you don't want your grade to slip simply because they can't be motivated to care.

And this attitude and strategy, developed in elementary school, continues on until you die. Because joy of all joys, in the workplace, probably one of the most important skills your employers will care about is whether or not you're a "team player". So the few people who were raised with and/or developed a good work ethic are stuck with the majority of the rest of the workforce who skated through on the coattails of the geeky people who wanted good grades. What this means for your work teams is two things:
1) They're still going to try and do as little as possible
2) Because they never actually did anything in middle school, high school, and college (and heaven forbid - but true for many - even grad school), they therefore know next to nothing.

What this means for the "non-team-player" is that, yet again, you will be on cleanup. They will hem and haw and futz around for weeks, pushing the project closer and closer to behind schedule - and sometimes even into the land of "waaaay past the deadline" and when you have finished your piece and all the other pieces that weren't assigned but left for "whoever finishes their part first", then you get the priviledge of bailing out the moron.

You have two choices when faced with this dilemma:
1) Do their work, perpetuate the cycle, make the "team" look good, keep your mouth shut, and be patted on the head by management while you stew inwardly and develop all kinds of fun things ranging from ulcers to high blood pressure to migraines - you know, all the stress induced ailments.

2) Don't do their work, try to explain that they need to do it, be labled "not a team player", watch as the other person is patted on the head while you're villanized, and then end up doing the work anyway having succeeded only in making yourself look bad.

There's no good way to win. Because at the end of the day, you're either someone with a work ethic or you're a team player. And never the twain shall meet.