Not Everything Needs to Be Teamwork

pencil shavings — Pencils being sharpened

Some work needs a team. Some work just needs one person and a pencil sharpener.

So much of teamwork is figuring out what you need, what you bring, and what you can offer.

But teamwork is also about reading minds.

To be successful on a team, you have to be a great mind reader. A clairvoyant.

This is especially true in education because we never tell you the goals, the outcomes, or the way we like to have things delivered. Sometimes you are filling the spot of someone who was beloved, and you are expected to be them, complete with bringing banana bread on Tuesdays. Other times you are filling the role of someone they were glad to part ways with, so you will do best by just breathing quietly in the corner.

You can’t know because we don’t tell you.

You have to figure it out.

You may wonder why we don’t tell you. It isn’t because we want you to fail. No, it is because we don’t have the words for it. We haven’t spent enough time thinking about it. In fact, we don’t think about it until you piss us off.

That’s teamwork. Show up the best you can, do what you think is right, and then we will tell you if you failed or succeeded.

Mostly, though, we will tell you where you failed.

Succeed, and we might undercut you because you are moving in on our territory. So show up, do your best, but not your best best, and wait and see.

Good luck.

In all seriousness, it feels like this at times.

But it doesn’t have to.

One reason we get ourselves into messy team dynamics is because we think everything needs to be done as a team. I study teamwork, and let me tell you this: that is a lie.

Work done by teams should really only fall into three categories:

Massive Scale: Work that is simply too much for one person to do in the time given.
Diverse Brainpower: Work that genuinely benefits from multiple, distinct perspectives.
Refinement: Work where someone has already created a draft, plan, idea, or structure, and the team helps make it better.

If we assign teams work that can be done by one person just to make it a “team activity,” we create instant discord. It isn’t necessary. Find work that fits into one of these categories, or stop.

Here’s an example: my students think building a slide deck is the ultimate team project.

It isn’t.

A slide deck can be built by one person. Thinking about, talking about, and engaging with what goes on the slides can be teamwork, but the execution is individual.

Sometimes in schools, we assign teams the job of turning in notes from a meeting. We think that is a team job.

It isn’t.

Turning in notes from a meeting is a one-person job. One person takes the notes. One person sends the email. If they suck at note-taking, they should get better. Having someone else proofread the notes before submitting isn’t teamwork either. That is just helping.

Once, a teammate and I actually did take team notes. I would sit on the couch in my fourth-grade classroom and type into a shared document. If I spelled something wrong or made a typo, my teammate was right there to fix it in real time.

It felt awesome.

Please read with sarcasm.

But notice the difference between that and planning a massive event. When you host a large group of people, that is real teamwork. You decide on the themes, the agenda, the decor, and the plan together. Then you look at who has the skills and desires, and you let them run with different elements. You come back together to talk about how it all connects, determine what success looks like, and communicate that to the entire group. You let people voice what excites them, what makes them nervous, and what they have never tried before. You decide who gives feedback and who provides backup if someone gets stuck.

Then you execute.

In school, this can look like planning a unit, hosting a reading event, or differentiating instruction for a group of students.

Not sharpening pencils.

That is not teamwork. That is a task. We do not need four adults gathered around the electric sharpener discussing pencil readiness, workflow, and shared accountability. We need one person to sharpen the pencils. Maybe two if the sharpener jams and someone has a paper clip.

This is where we get ourselves into trouble. We dress up simple tasks as collaboration and then wonder why everyone is annoyed.

I wonder how many people right now in schools and businesses across the country are forcing collaboration on activities that are actually individual tasks cosplaying as teamwork.

It makes us all hate teams.

We’ve got to stop.

This doesn’t mean we have to go it alone. Getting help, talking through ideas, and dividing up work are excellent things to do. But they aren’t inherently teamwork. There are distinct levels of trust hiding in how we collaborate:

Helping: I trust you to assist me.
Collaborating: I trust you with my ideas.
Co-creating: I trust you to change what we’re making, even the parts I started.

Which makes a shared Google Doc such a perfect little laboratory for this.

There is a massive, meaningful difference between a colleague suggesting a comment on your work and someone putting their cursor in the middle of your sentence and rewriting the damn thing.

Co-creation requires explicit permission precisely because ownership gets blurry. It’s no longer mine or yours. We’ve agreed that it’s ours.

When something genuinely requires a team, that’s when clarity about success, roles, and expectations becomes essential.

Build that clarity first.

No mind-reading required.