A few days ago, in a post titled, "Recognizing the 'I' in 'TEAM'," I wrote about how each individual brings something different to the team. I said, "a good team is composed of multiple individuals, each of whom brings a unique combination of talents, training, skills, experience, and perspective to the effort."
Then I remembered this quote by Vince Lombardi, one of the greatest football coaches of the 20th century, who said:
"Individual commitment to a group effort— that's what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work."
Understand that I am not a big football fan—and I never have been—so I have no idea where I actually ran across this quotation. But it aligns so completely with my own beliefs about how teams are built and how they function, and the fact that different individuals bring different contributions to the team effort, that I copied the quote into a file I keep of interesting quotes.
(Validation is a great thing, and the source from which it arises doesn't matter.)
Did you ever watch a movie and then read or listen to a review, and wonder if you and the critic saw the same movie? That's because every individual takes in information through a different set of filters based on experience, age, gender, education, priorities, and a host of other criteria. And all our (outgoing) actions are ultimately based on how we process, store, and use this (incoming) information.
No two people are exactly the same—studies have shown that even "identical" twins will respond differently to the same stimulus, will absorb and catalog information differently, and will even differ in how they value and prioritize specific information. So it should be no surprise that different people bring different personal value propositions to a team.
In fact, a good team leader selects team his/her members based on those personal value propositions and how they align with the needs of the project on which the team is working, or in the case of A/E marketers, the project for which the team is competing.
Think of it this way: If your firm wanted to create a proposal to manage a major planning, design, and construction effort for a large municipal water system, would you want a proposal team consisting solely of water pipeline engineers? or would you also want your proposal team to include people with expertise in water treatment, utility system operations, city planning, utility construction, GRAPHIC DESIGN AND MARKETING?
Every individual selected for every one of those technical specialties will have a personal value proposition that is based on training, skills, experience, and perspective unique to that person—a collection of value propositions required for the creation of a winning proposal.
The ultimate success of the team is measured by how all those individual combinations are able to mesh—to work together, to support each other, to fill in the blanks in other team members' combinations—to achieve the goal of developing a winning value proposition for the team and a winning proposal based on that value proposition.