Playing on Teams

"I had been educated in an individualistic culture. My scores were mine. No one else came into it, except as competitors. in some imagined race. I was on my own in the learning game at school and at the university. Not so in my work, I soon realized. Nothing happened there unless other people cooperated. How to win friends and influence people was not a course in my curriculum. Unfortunately, it was to prove essential in my new life. Being an individual star would not help me much if it was in a failing group. A group failure brought me down along with the group. Our destinies were linked, which meant that classmates were now colleagues, not competitors. Teams were something I had encountered on the sports field, not in the classroom. They were in the box marked “fun” in my mind, not the one marked “work” or even “life.” My new challenge, I discovered was to merge these three boxes. I had discovered, rather later than most, the necessity of others. It was the start of my real
education."

Charles Handy in his book The Hungry Spirit