Is Teamwork Overrated? Being a Better Self First

A few years into consulting, I sat in a debrief where a project had landed six weeks late and well over budget. I asked what happened. Five people gave me the same answer, in five different ways: “It was a team effort.” Nobody was lying. It really was a team effort — five capable people, each quietly assuming someone else was covering the part that never got done. That meeting is the reason I stopped treating “teamwork” as an automatic virtue, and started asking a more useful question: who, exactly, is accountable when everyone in the room is a little worse than they’d be on their own? It’s a question worth sitting with, because the honest answer isn’t flattering to how most of us were taught to think about collaboration.

Why Every Job Post Wants a “Team Player”

Open ten job listings and at least eight will ask for a “strong team player.” It sounds harmless, even admirable. But sit through enough hiring meetings and you notice what the phrase is actually doing. It rarely means “this person will make the group sharper.” More often it means “this person won’t cause friction,” which is a different quality entirely, and not always a good one. Teams that prize smoothness over substance quietly select for agreeableness over competence — and then wonder why decisions take three meetings and still land soft.

There’s a second, less flattering reason companies love team language: it spreads accountability so thin that no individual has to own the outcome. When a launch goes well, everyone was “instrumental.” When it fails, it was a “team miss.” That framing protects egos. It does nothing for the work.

The “Two-Pizza Team” Problem

Jeff Bezos famously ran Amazon on a rule that any team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. The logic wasn’t about pizza, obviously — it was about coordination cost. Every person you add to a group increases the number of relationships that need managing, not in a straight line but exponentially. A team of four has six lines of communication. A team of nine has thirty-six. Somewhere past a certain size, the energy a group spends managing itself starts to outweigh the energy it spends producing anything, and “teamwork” quietly becomes a full-time coordination job with no output attached to it.

Software engineers have known a version of this for decades. Fred Brooks, in a book about a mainframe project that went sideways in the 1970s, put it bluntly: adding people to a late project makes it later. New people need onboarding, existing people need to stop and explain things, and the communication overhead grows faster than the extra hands can offset it. The lesson generalizes well past software. More people is not the same as more capability. It’s only more capability when each added person is a strong, self-sufficient unit — otherwise you’re just adding more surface area for things to fall through.

You’re Already Running the Most Sophisticated Team on Earth

Before you decide teamwork is beneath you, it’s worth remembering you’re not actually a solo act. Your brain alone runs on roughly 86 billion neurons, each one firing in coordination with thousands of others, thousands of times a second, without a single status update meeting between them. Zoom out further and your body is running eleven separate systems — circulatory, respiratory, nervous, digestive, and so on — each complex enough to be its own engineering marvel, all somehow synchronized well enough that you can read this sentence while your heart keeps time and your lungs keep filling without you giving either one a single conscious instruction.

By some estimates, the human body is built from roughly 37 trillion cells. Every one of them is, in a sense, doing its job so the whole can function. None of them called in sick. None of them waited for the others to move first. That is teamwork at a scale no org chart will ever touch — and it works precisely because each individual unit does its part completely, not because a committee negotiated the terms.

Where Teamwork Actually Falls Apart

Here’s the case for “overrated,” and it’s a real one. Put enough people in a room and you don’t automatically get a better decision — you often get a slower, blander one. Psychologists have a name for the trap: groupthink, where the desire for consensus quietly overrides the willingness to raise an inconvenient truth. Design-by-committee has a similar failure mode — ask ten people to shape one thing and you tend to get something that offends no one and excites no one either.

Then there’s diffusion of responsibility, which is the polite name for what happened in that debrief I mentioned earlier. If a task belongs to “the team,” it can quietly belong to no one. Every person can, in good conscience, assume somebody else has it handled. The bigger the group, the more comfortable that assumption becomes, and the more likely the ball gets dropped in plain sight of everyone.

Where It Isn’t Overrated At All

None of this means solo effort beats collaboration everywhere. Some problems are simply too large for one person to hold in their head at once — building a product, running a company, coordinating a launch across time zones. Some problems need genuinely different expertise in the room at the same time, not sequentially. And some situations reward speed at scale that only a coordinated group can produce. Pretending otherwise, and trying to be a one-person department because delegation feels inefficient, is its own kind of self-sabotage.

The honest answer isn’t “teamwork good” or “teamwork bad.” It’s that teamwork is a tool, and like any tool, it’s only as good as the hands holding it.

Teamwork Isn’t Overrated. Dependence Is.

Here’s the distinction that actually matters: healthy teams are built from strong individual units that also coordinate well. Weak teams are built from people leaning on the group to avoid personal accountability. Your body makes the same distinction, whether you’ve thought about it that way or not. Your organs cooperate, but each one still does its own job completely — your liver doesn’t wait for your kidneys to catch up. The moment one system quietly checks out and expects the others to compensate, you don’t get resilience. You get illness.

The same is true in a business. A team of five people who’ve each done the work to be excellent, self-directed, and reliable on their own will outperform a team of eight who are counting on the group to average out their weaknesses. Teamwork doesn’t multiply weak individuals into a strong team. It just distributes the weakness more evenly — and makes it harder to trace.

Building the Team Inside You First

If there’s a practical takeaway here, it’s this: before you can be a genuinely useful teammate, you have to become someone worth depending on — starting with your own follow-through. A few things that actually move that needle:

Single-threaded ownership. Before joining any group project, define the one piece that is unambiguously yours — not “the team’s deliverable,” but the specific slice only you are accountable for. Diffusion dies the moment ownership gets specific.

The empty-room test. Would you still finish this the same way if no one was watching, no one would know, and no one would ask? If the honest answer is no, you’re relying on external accountability to do the job your own standards should be doing.

Build a track record with yourself first. Self-trust isn’t a feeling you talk yourself into — it’s evidence you accumulate. Small commitments kept, consistently, are what let you walk into a group setting already knowing you’ll hold your end, instead of hoping the group will cover for you if you don’t.

Know your one non-negotiable strength. The thing you don’t need permission, a committee, or a certificate to be excellent at. Every strong team is really a collection of people who each know exactly what that is for themselves.

Remote Work Made This Impossible to Hide

For a long time, an office let weak individual contribution hide inside strong group optics. You could be present, visibly busy, nodding in the right meetings, and let the team’s collective output cover for the fact that your personal slice of it was thin. Remote and hybrid work stripped that camouflage away almost overnight. When nobody can see you at your desk, the only thing that proves you’re contributing is the work itself landing on time, done well, without someone else having to chase it. Teams that were carrying passengers found out fast, because there was nowhere left for a passenger to sit quietly.

That’s not an argument against remote work. It’s an argument that remote work is simply more honest about a truth that was always there: teams don’t create accountability, individuals bring it with them. A distributed team of people who’ve each done their own “better self” work often outperforms a co-located team that’s leaning on proximity and shared coffee breaks to feel like a team. Physical closeness was never the thing that made collaboration work. Individual reliability was, and remote work just made that fact impossible to ignore.

What Twenty-Five Years of Hiring Taught Me

I’ve sat on enough sides of the hiring table — as the one hiring, the one being hired, and the outside consultant brought in to fix a team that wasn’t working — to notice a pattern. When a team underperforms, the instinct is almost always to add a person: another marketer, another developer, another coordinator to “bridge the gap.” It rarely works, because the gap usually isn’t a headcount problem. It’s an ownership problem, and you can’t hire your way out of that. Adding a sixth person to a five-person team that already can’t agree on who’s accountable for what just gives the group one more place to point.

The strongest teams I’ve worked with or built shared one trait that had nothing to do with talent density: every single person on them could describe, in one sentence, exactly what they alone were responsible for. Not “marketing,” but “I own whether this campaign hits its cost-per-lead target.” Not “development,” but “I own whether the checkout flow ships without breaking anything.” That specificity is what separates a team from a group of people who happen to share a Slack channel. And it only exists when the individuals in that room have already done the work of being dependable on their own — the “better self” this whole piece keeps circling back to.

Audit your own dependency habits. Notice how often you wait for consensus before starting something you already know how to do. Waiting for a green light you don’t actually need is a quiet form of outsourcing your own judgment.

Separate collaboration from validation. Asking for input to make the work better is collaboration. Asking for input because you don’t trust your own decision is validation-seeking dressed up as teamwork. Learn to tell the two apart in yourself before you walk into the next group discussion.

Back to That Debrief

I think about that late, over-budget project sometimes. The problem was never that five people worked together. The problem was that none of them had done the quieter work of becoming someone the group could actually depend on — so the group became a place to hide, instead of a place to build. Teamwork isn’t overrated. Using the team as a substitute for personal accountability is. Get good at being one reliable, self-directed unit first. The team you eventually join, or build, will be an entirely different kind of strong — not because everyone finally learned to get along, but because nobody in the room needs the group to cover for them anymore. That’s the version of teamwork worth having. Everything else is just a meeting.

Related reading: Stronglifting for a Better Self, and Are You Selling Yourself Right Online (and Enough)?