All groups and organizations should function as teams in which everyone makes decisions and shares responsibilities and duties. Giving one person central authority and responsibility for a project or task is not an effective way to get work done"



I agree with the author on the issue that all groups and organizations, functioning as teams, in which everyone shares responsibilities and makes decisions towards a project or a task is an effective way to get work done, for two major reasons.

First, assigning responsibility to a single person for the entire task does not guarantee its completion, especially if time is a crucial factor. If the tasks and responsibilities associated with that project are shared among members of a team who could work on different pieces parallely by co-ordinating with each other, there is a higher probability of getting the same work done in lesser time than the time a single person would take to complete it. For example, if a non-profit group has to organize a fund raising event, it would involve various independent tasks such as event planning, marketing and ticket sales etc. It would not make sense for a single authority, say a director of the organization to take up the entire responsibility of completing the project in a sequential manner, task after task. It would however make sense to divide the project into independent projects and assign them to appropriate teams in the organization, so that different tasks could be completed independently in optimal amount of time.

Second, quality of work may not be up to the mark as it is highly possible that the single person assigned the task is not an expert in all of the skills required for the project. A better option would be to dissect the project into various subtasks,identify different members of a team and assign them the tasks based on their talent and skill level.For instance,consider that a Information Technology firm takes up a software development project, which involves various tasks such as designing the User interface, creating and maintaining databases, and testing the end product before it is released to the customer. If all of these tasks are assigned to a single developer who is an expert in database development but is not very good at testing, the outcome of the project may not be of high quality. However, if the firm assigns the project to a team, different tasks can be taken up by different members of the team. The database developer can entirely focus on the database tasks and the designer can concentrate on getting a better design. This would result in an output that has better quality and efficiency that it would have had if done by a single person.

Some may argue that, sharing responsibilities and duties might lead to members not contributing to their full capacity and depending on others to complete their tasks. However, the benefits achieved from the same outweigh such risks.

In sum, the effective way to get work done means achieving the best quality output possible in less time. And that is only possible if multiple persons share their decisions, responsibilities and work together as a team. This not only results in better productivity but also is a way to build healthy relationship among the employees in a group or an organization.