英语好文22.6.23

Teams have become the basic building blocks of organizations. Recruitment advertisements routinely call for “team players”. Business schools grade their students in part on their performance in group projects. Office managers knock down walls to encourage team building. Teams are as old as civilization, of course: even Jesus had 12 co-workers. But a new report by Deloitte, “Global Human Capital Trends”, based on a survey of more than 7,000 executives in over 130 countries, suggests that the fashion for teamwork has reached a new high. Almost half of those surveyed said their companies were either in the middle of restructuring or about to embark on (开始）it; and for the most part, restructuring meant putting more emphasis on teams.

团队已经变成了组织的基础。招聘广告总是反复地说“我们要具有团队精神的人”。商业学院在评价他们的学生的时候，也是要把学生在团体项目中的表现作为一部分。团队经理也会打破壁垒去鼓励队伍建设。团队和文化一样悠久，当然了，甚至是耶稣都拥有12个队员。但是Del写的一篇新的报道说“全球人力资本潮流”，基于一个130多个国家，7000多个参与者，表明了团队合作的潮流已经到达了一个新的高度。甚至他们大多数的被调研的人说他们的公司正在重组或是即将开始重组，并且对于大部分来说，重组意味着更多的在团队建设上的重视。

Companies are abandoning conventional functional departments and organising employees into cross-disciplinary teams that focus on particular products, problems or customers. These teams are gaining more power to run their own affairs. They are also spending more time working with each other rather than reporting upwards. Deloitte argues that a new organisational form is on the rise: a network of teams is replacing the conventional hierarchy (等级体制).

公司正在放弃传统的、基础的部分并且组织员工去进入跨领域的队伍，这些队伍这在获取更多管理自己事务的权力。他们正在花费更多时间去和其他人合作而不是向上级汇报。Del认为这种新的组织形式正在趋于上升趋势，一种队伍的合作正在替换传统的等级体制。

The fashion for teams is driven by a sense that the old way of organising people is too rigid for both the modem marketplace and the expectations of employees. Technological innovation places greater value on agility (灵活性).John Chambers, chairman of Cisco Systems Inc., a worldwide leader in electronics products, says that “we compete against market transitions (过渡)，not competitors. Product transitions used to take five or seven years; now they take one or two. ” Digital technology also makes it easier for people to co-ordinate their activities without resorting to hierarchy. The “millennials” (千禧一代) who will soon make up half the workforce in rich countries were raised from nursery school onwards to work in groups.

团队热潮受到一种观念的驱使，就是老旧的组织人们的方式对于现代的市场和员工们的期待过于死板。科技的发展把更多的价值放到了灵活性上。John，思科的主席，思科是一个在电子产品的世界巨头，说，我们正在对抗市场过度，并不是竞争对手。产品转换曾经要花5-7年，现在只需要1-2年。数字科技也让人们更简单的去合作而并不是依靠与等级制度。千禧一代将会在富裕国家占据一半的劳动力，他们甚至在幼儿园就开始分配工作了。

 The fashion for teams is also spreading from the usual corporate suspects (such as GE and IBM) to some more unusual ones. The Cleveland Clinic, a hospital operator, has reorganised its medical staff into teams to focus on particular treatment areas; consultants, nurses and others collaborate closely instead of being separated by speciality (专业)and rank. The US Army has gone the same way. In his book, “Team of Teams' General Stanley McChrystal describes how the army’s hierarchical structure hindered its operations during the early stages of the Iraq war. His solution was to learn something from the insurgents it was fighting: decentralise authority to self-organising teams.

 团队热潮也从一些常规的企业传播到非常规的企业，克利夫兰诊所，一所医院运营商，已经组织的他的医生员工从队伍到集中于特殊领域的治疗。咨询顾问，护士和其他的人员紧密的联系到一起尽管有专业和等级的差距。美国军队也是这样，在他的书《团队的团队》，将军概括了军队的等级制度是怎样在早期伊拉克战争中阻碍作战计划的，他的解决方式的从正在与其战斗的对手中学习，将权力分散到各自作战的队伍中

A good rule of thumb is that as soon as generals and hospital administrators jump on a management bandwagon, it is time to ask questions. Leigh Thompson of Kellogg School of Management in Illinois warns that, ‘Teams are not always the answer—teams may provide insight, creativity and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot; but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay and poor decision-making.” The late Richard Hackman of Harvard University once argued, “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary... But don’t count on it.”                                            

一个好的经验是，只要将军和医院管理者开始了一种管理潮流时，是时候发问了！学校的一个Lei警告说，团队不是唯一解，团队也许会提供一个人工作不会有的独特的见解，创造力和某些方面的只是，但是团队合作也会导致疑惑、拖延和非常差的决定力。之后Ri也说，当你有一个队伍的时候，毫无疑问，你也许存在能创造出一些有魔力的可能性，产生一些非凡的东西，但是不要依赖他。

Hackman (who died in 2013) noted that teams are hampered by problems of co-ordination and motivation that chip away at the benefits of collaboration. High-flyers forced to work in teams may be undervalued and free-riders empowered. Groupthink may be unavoidable. In a study of 120 teams of senior executives, he discovered that less than 10% of their supposed members agreed on who exactly was on the team. If it is hard enough to define a team’s membership, agreeing on its purpose is harder still.

Hack，死于2013年，说到，团队受到互相配合和动机的问题的影响，这会损坏合作带来的好处。团队中能干的人也许会被低估但是干得少的人也许会被赋予权力，团队思考也许是不可避免的，在一个研究中，有120个高级经理人，他发现少于%10的同意谁真正的在这个团队。如果足够困难去定义团队的人员，那么在团队目标达成一致也是相当困难的。

Profound changes in the workforce are making teams trickier to manage. Teams work best if their members have a strong common culture. This is hard to achieve when, as is now the case in many big firms, a large proportion of staff are temporary contractors. Teamwork improves with time: America’s National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its civil-aviation database occurred on a crew’s first day of flying together. However, as Amy Edmondson of Harvard points out, organisations increasingly use “team” as a verb rather than a noun: they form teams for specific purposes and then quickly disband them.

深刻的劳动力变化正在让团队管理越来越难。如果团队成员有着强烈的、相同的文化，那么这样会让团队做得很好。这是非常难去实现的，因为现在在很多大公司里，员工的一大部分是临时的合同工。团队合作随着时间在改善。美国的国家运输安全委员会发现，在民航数据库中，%73的事故发生于机组人员的第一次飞行。不过，AMY指出，组织更多的把这个team作为一个动词而并不是名词，他们他们为了特定的目的去组建团队，然后又很快的解散。

The least that can be concluded from this research is that companies need to think harder about managing teams. They need to rid their minds of sentimentalism (感情用事)：the most successful teams have leaders who are able to set an overall direction and take immediate action. They need to keep teams small and focused: giving in to pressure to be more “inclusive” is a guarantee of dysfunction. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s boss, says that “If I see more than two pizzas for lunch, the team is too big.” They need to immunize teams against group-think: Hackman argued that the best ones contain “deviants” (离经叛道者）who are willing to do something that maybe upsetting to others.

从这个实验中，我们至少可以推断出，需要对管理团队有着更加深刻的思考。他们需要摆脱感情用事的思考方式，最成功的队伍拥有着领导者，他们可以制定全方位的方向和采取开苏的行动。他们需要让队伍变得精致且精简：屈服于压力而变得更加包容一定会导致功能失调。亚马逊老板说，如果我看到午餐超过两个披萨，那这个团队就太大了。他们要避免团队思维，Hack认为最好的是包含着一个离经叛道者，他喜欢做一些让别人难受的事情。

A new study of 12,000 workers in 17 countries by Steelcase, a furniture-maker which also does consulting, finds that the best way to ensure employees are “engaged” is to give them more control over where and how they do their work―which may mean liberating them from having to do everything in collaboration with others.

Stee在17个国家的12000名员工中，做了一项新的研究，他是一位家具制作者，返现了最好的保证员工去参与是给他们足够的控制权在他们怎样工作这个方面，这也许意味着他们办妥了不得不与其他人合作这件事。

However, organisations need to learn something bigger than how to manage teams better: they need to be in the habit of asking themselves whether teams are the best tools for the job. Teambuilding skills are in short supply: Deloitte reports that only 12% of the executives they contacted feel they understand the way people work together in networks and only 21% feel confident in their ability to build cross-functional teams. Loosely managed teams can become hotbeds of distraction―employees routinely complain that they can’t get their work done because they are forced to spend too much time in meetings or compelled to work in noisy offices. Even in the age of open-plan offices and social networks some work is best left to the individual.

不过，组织需要学习比怎样管理团队更重要的事，他们需要去问问他们自己是否团队是对工作最好的工具。团队建设的技巧十分短缺，Del报道说他们调查的人之中只有%12的人们理解这种联网工作方式，并且只有%21感觉到他们能够建设一个团队的能力。宽松管理的团队会变得分散注意力，团队成员总是抱怨他们完成不了工作，因为他们强迫花太多时间在会议或者是嘈杂的工作室里工作，甚至是开放式办公和社交网络的时代，某些工作最好还是留给个人来做。