I mentioned in a post last week about how “lone ranger” teaching can seem.  It’s always interesting (and jarring), then, when you have to work well with others in some broader context.  That’s when words like “team” get thrown around.

I really like the take that Patrick Lencioni has on the concept of the team in The Advantage.  From the chapter on building a cohesive leadership team:

The word team has been so overused and misused in society that it has lost much of its impact.  The truth is, few groups of leaders actually work like a team, or at least not the kind that is required to lead a healthy organization.  Most of the resemble what Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, authors of the book, The Wisdom of Teams, call a “working group.”

A good way to understand a working group is to think of it like a golf team, where players go off and play on their own and then get together and add up their scores at the end of the day. A real team is more like a basketball team, one that plays together simultaneously, in an interactive, mutually dependent, and often interchangeable way.  Most working groups reflexively call themselves teams because that’s the word society uses to describe any group of people who are affiliated in their work.

This distinction would constitute fighting words for some of the athletes and coaches that I know.  I get the sense and distinction that Lencioni is going for, though.  There’s something about the give-and-take you find in a real team dynamic that isn’t repeatable (or even possible) in other group situations.