Working as a Team Player Vs Individual

When Kumble retired, he told how he used to play with Srinath. One of them bowls in such a way that, the batsman is forced to play defence. By that, the batsman is forced to play attack for the other bowler. Other bowler bowls in such a way that, they would get excited to attack, and in the process, they lose the wicket.

If we see their bowling scores, one score does not look good, but another score looks good. Still, the selectors are intelligent enough to understand that. So, they did not remove anyone from the team.

Late 2007, Ganguly was struggling to retain his position in ODI cricket. In one match, when India needed to make quick runs in less no.of overs, Dhoni instructed everyone to play quickly. Even 15-20 runs in few balls per wicket was more than enough. But, Ganguly ignored that instruction, and happily made a half century by taking enough balls.

Irrespective of what happened to that match, Ganguly did not play with the team spirit. He did not play to win the match, but played to score more runs for himself. He thought, by scoring more runs, selectors would be happy and select him for the next series also. But, what selectors see is, whether they are playing to win the match or to score runs for himself. And, he was not selected for ODI matches, and slowly he was forced to retire even from tests.

The same thing is applicable for any domain. For cricket team, we have experienced selection team, and they are taking correct decisions. But, in many other domains, management is not recognizing the team spirit, but recognizing individual performance. Because of that all the team members who want recognition are doing things which gives better points in their profile, and are ignoring everything.

If anybody is doing performance review and the process is comparing with others, then they have to be very careful. In the review, if there is comparison with others, then most of the employees would be tempted to show their individual performance. Managers should encourage everyone to work for the project rather than for self. If a manager is directly managing more than 8 team members, then it would not be an easy task to identify whether somebody is working for the team or for self.