I have been told many times that the success of a team lies in its people. And that a team is only as good as its weakest member. A chink in the armour. A weakness that can potentially be compromised. A small hole that can potentially be a gaping gap that enemies can exploit.
I think these are wrong.
[ A team is as good as the dynamics that there are inside the team. ]
It is not the weakness nor the strength of one or a few that make a team good. Or bad. It is the interplay of the personalities, the strengths and the weaknesses, the formal and the informal communication lines, the overt and covert competitiveness of each individual in the team - all these are what make a team good. Or bad.
If the dynamics are in equilibrium (to borrow a word from game theory), then the team will function well. It is a well-oiled machine - and perhaps, even engineered with double-redundancies that could make it function in spite of the "weakest links" and selected dynamic dysfunctions.
If the dynamics are suddenly forced into disequilibrium, then the team's functioning could start to wobble. Either the team finds a new equilibrium on which to gather its strength - or it continues to fight the new "demand" for a new equilibrium.
Both of which puts the dynamics at risk.
And the entire team's functioning at risk.
The beauty of a team is that it acknowledges its imperfections - and yet continues to strive towards its goals and its vision. It acknowledges that it has weak and strong members, strong and weak personalities, different weltanschaungs and viewpoints - and yet it manages to act as one.
So is a team only as good as its weakest link?
No.
It is as good as how it manages to cope with the disequilibrium its environment forces it to face - and revert to a new, perhaps significantly different, equilibrium.
And how it then moves forward to get on with its goals with this new equilibrium.
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