A question most of us would hear when we appear for an Interview. Its a straight forward question for many and many of us do know that we need to say “Yes, We are a good team player”. If we say “No, We are Not” or “It depends on Circumstances” then you are blindly rejected.

Often i have been asked this question and as usual i used to answer with “Yes, I am”. Now a days i am seriously trying to find out whether i am really a good team player or not!

I started introspecting myself to understand, if i am a good team player why i always have to fight to be a team player and why not i display my individual characteristics within the team. During this phase of realization when i did fish bone analysis, i realized that interestingly everyone in this world are good team players in their area of interest and expertise and often they tend to become a bad team player only when external influences pushes them to break their rules of engagement. Interestingly, the reason for people to break their teams are the same people who asks the question and rejects if we say no, its the same HR team.

Majority of us know the performance measurement and bell curve in the Indian IT industry which is triggered every year and which decides the changes in the paycheck from that year on. Once upon a time, in early 2000’s it used to be a real good validation and people were never marked as bad performers or bad team players, instead people were told about their weakness and enabled them to overcome the same. But in the current IT world where HR decides on % buckets prior to engagement and they ask people to force and fit people into the buckets and always uses the word “Mandatory”. This is where it brings to a state where people were compared against each other within the same team and they were forced to compare and compete which is leading eventually to breakdown of whole team structure. I have seen organizations facing enormous number of problems in project delivery after each performance appraisal and quite significant percentage of it was caused due to broken team within.

In early 2000’s organizations used to think that employees are their assets and in present world they ignore that and always looks at employees as resources and physical bank balance and share holder trust as a asset. Often the management and Human resources teams assumes that when an employee leaves, we will be able to recruit another from market and they just stop thinking about it there itself. They ignore the fact that there are many more things to look at when an employee is leaving the organization, he is not leaving the company but a great team where he is also part of backbone and it takes too much time for new employee to fit in into old employees place and chances of his existence is always 50-50.

And also this fighting in between teams will become more and more tough as people moves from bottom to top positions to exist in the organization. And at this level they just starts comparing with others for their performance bucket and ignores the most important fundamental of engaging with team. If an employee is not adopted into team in a right way, he will also distances himself always away from the team and this will have adverse affect to organization in long term.