The New Why Teams Don't Work

chapter 2 Team Instinct

16

You can take the view that the human race is made up entirely of individual loners, each of us making our way by ourselves, all alone in the world.

We don’t.

For the most part, we are social creatures. We not only like one another’s company, we seek one another out in one situation after another. Deep down, we need this interaction, just as we need air, water, and life insurance.

This urge to connect with others is not absolutely universal. There are a few of us, scattered about, who display a lot less need for interaction than the rest of us do. And psychologists and anthropologists have indicated that a dimension of the human psyche does crave solitariness. Some people experience more of this than others.

But most ...