Why not teams

This is about the essence of why businesses may choose not to employ people.

It costs money and the more people that you have the more money it costs you. If you do the sums and discover that you need a team, the next bit will be to work out what that team will cost you. If the team costs more than it contributes then it just doesn't make sense to have it. Working out what it produces may not be as straightforward as it seems and so it what it costs.

The cost of people clearly involves what you pay them however it will also inclde the workstation for them, insurance and a host of other things that you may pay for. The bigger the team the more space you need and space costs money.

As the team gets bigger you will need an infrastructure to support it, not support the work it does, but support the fact there is a team, such as HR and so it goes.

All that aside, the biggest cost is getting them to do what you want them to do. If you don't manage them then the chance of them doing what you want in the way that you want it done will be reduced.

I often run an activity called Helium Stick to show this starkly. One person has to put a stick on the ground. That could be boring but there are some special requirements that make it vaguely interesting. That typically takes 2 seconds. Now the whole team have to put the stick on the ground together. Typically that takes 5 minutes or more and sometimes, if the team is large, it never gets to the ground. Why? As soon as you get more people involved things potentially get more complicated. A example of this comes from the last time you said, if you want something doing, do it yourself. In theory it should get easier when there is a team involved but the reality is that as soon as you have a team involved you have two ways of doing things, you have gaps, you have information split across at least two heads, all of which makes it harder to do what you were trying to do. But don't forget, you have the team because you need them, because of volume or skill range or synergy or momentum. But the team makes it harder. Now that has to be paradox of teams.

From time to time there could be complaints of people taking shortcuts, not doing the job right, it is them over there causing the problem, what are the management doing... and so the anti working together behaviours come out.

And that for me is one of the biggest costs of having a team, either managing the unhelfpul side of the team or the effect that not managing it produces.