Leadership and being a team player

It involves going back to the notion of team playing. If there is to be a team, especially if it involves people in physical proximity, the most basic requirement is that individuals recognise and respect each other's competence and weakness. That's all. They do not have to like each other. They do not have to do a course in management.

But someone has to get them working together. A multitude of rugged individualists is a lovely abstract thought, but in practice it would be chaos.

So the operative question is: By what criteria do we regard a certain kind of leadership as legitimate and how does it live with team playing?

Management, unhappily, provides no answers, other than the boilerplate nostrums of management theory itself. We have more hope looking at the animal kingdom, where the struggle for dominance is more overt than, these days, it is in our species. Yet, at base, we are exactly the same. We simply use different methods and techniques.

Team playing is one of those techniques. It is the antithesis of true leadership, which comes naturally. Lions just get on with it. As for us? Language instead of claws. Law instead of dinner.

Or as Peter Beattie would say: "Nothing's changed. And I take full responsibility for it."