The value of teamwork

Remember that old joke about business partners? Fellow on the phone says: “Sorry, my partner can’t come to the phone, he’s tied up right now…I always tie him up when I go out.”

Partnerships are a lot more serious these days and on a far more massive scale. Added value in strategic alliances. Teamwork at top level.

But, like many other life skills—such as dealing with bank managers and preventing plumbers from helping themselves to your life savings by the simple extraction of a foreign object from a U-Bend—our schools don’t always teach kids about partnerships or teamwork (though some do excellent work in that domain).

In fact, those schools that don’t just confuse the daylights out of them.

Picture the scene, There’s little Kobus sitting in Grade 5 and battling with a spelling test. No problem, he just leans over to have a look at what Sipho is doing. Their teacher yells at Kobus to stop his dirty low-down cheating and to do his test by himself.

Three hours later they are on the football field and there’s little Kobus flying down the wing with the ball and Sipho at centre forward, pleading with him to pass. Kobus decides to go it alone and cuts in towards the goal. He falls over his feet, loses the ball and the opposition scores on the counter attack.

Then, the same teacher who blitzed him only hours earlier for trying to team up with Sipho on the spelling test chews his ear off for going it alone when he should have passed the ball to Sipho.

By nightfall poor little Kobus is so confused he wets his bed and declares jihad on all teachers.

It all reminds him of his fifth birthday party when he and eight of his buddies were persuaded by the clown his mom hired to play musical chairs. Nine of them started with only eight chairs and one by one they were eliminated and the number of chairs reduced. Fat Louis had won that game and poor little Kobus couldn’t understand the point. All nine of them were supposed to be having fun at his party, he thought. And all that game did was make eight of them very unhappy while smug Louis was the only one with a smile on his face.

Surely, thought Kobus, it would have been a lot more fun if there had been only one chair and the game was to see how many kids could all get onto it at the same time ? Wasn’t that the team work adults kept going on about?

So, it is no surprise that many kids leave school with a completely warped idea of partnerships and teamwork. They’re taught about the principle, but not about the side effects.

Like competition. Children are told that this is something in business that brings out the best in products. But, they’re not taught that competition also brings out the worst in people.

There is no doubt that when the children of today leave school and go to university or start out on their careers, they are going to be continuously reminded by lecturers and managers that life is all about pulling together. About teamwork.

So, maybe our churches should take advantage of this and engage our youth about the teamwork that God requires. The “teamwork” that is fundamental to a congregation coming together for Mass on Sundays for example.

It is something kids will understand and relate to. And it should make a world of difference to that teenager who, at Sunday Mass, is not so much thinking about what God wants her to do, but what the kid in the next pew thinks about her new pair of jeans.