The Beauty of Teams
Dear Aesthetics People!
As I have been revising, rewriting, and rewording sections of my newest book project called Is Your Business Beautiful?, I have been ruminating on many of the core ideas and themes. Specifically, over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about what it would mean for a team at work to be beautiful. We likely don’t think of our work team as beautiful; we’re more likely to describe a team as effective, creative, or some other ‘functional’ term. But our common uses of language should not prevent us from calling a team beautiful.
The Big Business Book claims: “Individuals perform better in teams; they are more productive and more innovative.” This book then goes on to describe that “the most effective teams are those where members trust one another, share a strong sense of group identity, and have confidence in their effectiveness as a team.” What makes a good team? If you’re forming a new team, for example, what principles might you consider. While people may draw from different sources of information and research to answer this question, I think some important ideas come from aesthetics.
Think about one of the most prominent characteristics of beauty: proportion. This characteristic finds its origin in the beginning of western philosophy with Plato and Aristotle. Proportion involves the relationship of parts with the whole. A team could lack proportion, even if the each members is really good. To illustrate, think about a sports team that consisted of highly talented players, but the team as a whole was not very effective. In the context of business, imagine having a team of only visionary thinkers. This would not work well when things actually needed to get done. You need your team to have balance among different people’s talents. In fact, Meredith Belbin, a management theorist, posited nine roles for people in teams. And if everyone tried to perform the same role, then the team wouldn’t work. A team needs a balance among these roles to be most effective.
Philosopher Francis Hutcheson believed that a key idea of beauty was uniformity amidst diversity. When an object has too much uniformity, it can be boring. When it has too much diversity, it can be chaotic. So, these two poles exist in tension with each other. And this is how it needs to be for a well-functioning team. To create this environment, there must be a strong sense of psychological safety. To explain, we look to Rochelle Mucha’s book called Aesthetic Intelligence. She studied theater groups to see what could be applied to business contexts. Individual actors were free to experiment with their roles during rehearsals. Sometimes it worked well, and sometimes it didn’t work at all. But no one got mad or fired because they dared to try something experimental; they were allowed to safely experiment. Businesses need to allow people to have and voice divergent views on different topics and issues. Diverse teams inevitably lead to more diverse ideas; otherwise, habits about the familiar ways we do things eventually become more dogmatic.
Thomas Aquinas, a medieval theologian and philosopher, asserts integrity as one of his three conditions of beauty (the other two are proportion and radiance). Integrity in this context means that something has the appropriate number of parts to perform its function. A bridge, for instance, must have structural integrity to be deemed safe and worthy of people crossing over on it. Some teams at work have too many, leading to redundancy. But probably a more common issue is that they have too few people, leading to some being overworked and ultimately getting burnt out. A team needs to have balance as mentioned above, but it also needs the right amount of people, which is not always obvious. This is why we need to regularly reassess our teams to create a higher chance of integrity.
It’s easy to focus on the individuals that comprise a team. After all, we generally hire people as individuals, and not whole teams at once. Individually these people may each bring amazing talents and knowledge. But this does not mean they make a great team. When we look at the team as a whole, we should see it as a beautiful blend. While I didn’t plunge the depths of these concepts here, I hope to have provided a different framework for thinking about developing or refining your team.
What do you think makes for a beautiful team?
Relevant ARL Articles
Performative Beauty and Knowledge by Connaturality
Aesthetic Experience: A Basic Reason for Action
ARL News
Digital Fashion: Theory, Practice, Implications edited by Michael R. Spicher, Sara Emilia Bernat, and Doris Domoszlai-Lantner comes out on July 25!
Michael is heading to NYC this week to speak on a panel about Beauty & Sustainability.
*To invite me to lead a workshop or speak on how to re-humanize your work culture, please email me at michaelrspicher@gmail.com