Six days, for the six types of literacy that I will need in the world after COVID - part four

Did new technologies allow us to work better and easier as a team, or did they distance us and make it harder for us to work as a team? Today I am writing to you about

Team literacy

And, again, everything is connected. The same illiteracy also makes us both selfish and less able to work in a team. When the impulse reigns and when it is seduced by iconic stories, when we are accustomed to being the only one in the center of attention and when that attention is easily broken, the ability to empathize about needs or just the points of view of others is also weak. This, in turn, has direct consequences for the fact that we need to function in the current and future post-industrial world.

That world is rapidly becoming even more complex. More and more occupations are now contextual and dependent on the complementary knowledge and skills of others around us, members of one team. Lonely cowboys are slowly losing their prairies. ‘The project delivery factor,’ as they say in Silicon Valley, ‘is the team’. Teamwork is primarily based on impulse literacy and empathy. Successful teamwork requires balancing different energies: introversion and extroversion, different communication styles, recognizing a common mission or goal. Teamwork is an extraordinary training in introspection and understanding one's own sides of personality.

The ‘rack profile’ is a simple but powerful concept: we all have more pronounced and less pronounced sides of our personalities, especially when judged in a specific professional or group context. Let's just take the generic term, often used in job advertisements, 'good communicator'. It is one of the more vain descriptions, almost completely useless if it is not put in a specific context. What kind of communication are we talking about? Some are strong in public presentation to dozens of foreigners, even company executives, for some it is their biggest nightmare; some are excellent in 1-on-1 communication, but not very useful in creative workshops; some write extraordinarily, others barely compose a few functional sentences. There are many sides to a ‘good communicator’, which ones are critical to this specific position because we will have a hard time finding a person who has it all together?

The same is true for many other dimensions that companies and their consultants use to find candidates to describe different positions. ‘Energetic’ (what kind of energy: permanent but slow, for example for a marathon, or fast and short, for sprints?); ‘Smart’ (useless general); ‘motivated’ (pathological, or…?) Here’s one from my personal experience, but carefully thought out: one of the four ‘baskets’ of characteristics that Google uses to assess its candidates is ‘Guglines’, in which one of the very essential dimensions of ‘success in chaos’. In a sense, chaos should not paralyze us, but be treated as an opportunity to radically change things for the better, or to see a commercial opportunity in it. Chaos rewards agile, fast, flexible. Chaos is good, if approached properly. So if he doesn't index candidates very high by this characteristic, it is to be expected that he won't have many happy moments in a company like Google.

A team is a collage of personalities for a specific context and for specific goals. Understanding our own ‘rack profile’, as well as the people around us, helps to achieve ‘synergy’ (another favorite word of the business world). As with a team of astronauts or special forces, complementary talents and personalities are critical. It takes less ‘adjustment’ and stress to fit. There is more understanding and acceptance of everyone's contribution to the whole, specific 'holes' in the team when we are not there. And, again, we don’t learn about this in school, or later. We are emotionally illiterate, which usually means group illiterate. As in our common evolutionary past, our survival depends on working together, small and large, globally and locally.