What’s the best way to brainstorm in a team? What are the advantages of team-building?
Being on a team can help you reach your full potential, argues Adam Grant. In a team that’s centered on a unifying goal, everyone can help the other members by teaching skills in their particular area of expertise.
Below, we’ll look at the advantages of team-building to show what your organization can gain from a unified team.
Advantage #1: Enhance Your Skills
One of the advantages of team-building is that you not only learn from a variety of skilled people but also enhance your skills by teaching others. When you explain something to someone else, you re-examine and reinforce your understanding of it, leading to significant personal growth.
Similarly, teaching someone how to achieve something makes you feel more capable of achieving your own goals. When you successfully teach someone, it’s proof that you know what you’re doing, and internalizing this proof helps you feel more confident. Research even shows that giving encouraging advice is more motivating than receiving such encouragement from others.
| The Positive Social Pressure of Teaching Others In The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy also argues that people can enhance their learning by teaching others. She elaborates that this is because the prospect of teaching another person carries tremendous social pressure: You know that the quality of your teaching will determine whether the people you’re teaching will be impressed or think poorly of you. This drives you to more rigorously understand what you’re going to teach. Murphy also concurs with Grant that teaching helps people feel more capable and confident. She explains that some nonprofit organizations are leveraging this fact to help struggling students build academic motivation: For instance, the Valued Youth Partnership assigns children at risk of dropping out of school to tutor younger children. When these struggling kids see that their academic work is helping someone, it strengthens their self-image, leading them to attend school more consistently and get better grades. |
Advantage #2: Generating Ideas
In addition to increasing your skills and confidence, being on a team can help you generate better ideas, according to Grant. When teams put their heads together, they can come up with creative solutions to a wider variety of problems—at least in theory. Unfortunately, many teams try to do this by brainstorming in a group, which often causes people to avoid sharing their good ideas to protect themselves from negative judgment.
Instead of group brainstorming, Grant recommends something called “brainwriting.” In this process, participants generate ideas for possible solutions independently. Then the team compiles a list of everyone’s ideas—without revealing who came up with each idea—and shares it for everyone to judge alone. After everyone’s had a chance to form an unbiased opinion, the team gathers to discuss the best ideas. This allows the team to judge everyone’s ideas on their objective merits, leading them to the best solutions.
| Big Teams Hamper Creativity In Quiet, Susan Cain also criticizes the traditional brainstorming process. She notes that the more people involved in a brainstorming session, the less effective it is. This makes sense when viewed with Grant’s logic: Since there are more people to judge your contributions, this increased pressure more strongly discourages people, especially introverts, from voicing their good ideas. Cain would likely support Grant’s suggested process of brainwriting. She contends that for creativity to flourish, you need to be alone, and you need to be able to concentrate intensely. This implies that the most important step in Grant’s brainwriting process is independent idea generation. The other parts of the process are probably more flexible: If you skip the independent judgment stage and come together to discuss everybody’s ideas, you’ll likely still get significantly better results than traditional brainstorming. |
