There's No "Internet" in "Team"

As I've written before, I had the opportunity on this trip to see quite a few different Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) operations, administered and staffed by MSF offices in France, Belgium and Switzerland (staffers were from all over the world, but I mention this because the different national headquarters have slightly different operational philosophies).

As far as I could tell (in the very short time I had in each place), the national origin of the operation (e.g. MSF France in North Kivu, MSF Suisse in Ituri, etc.) and its specific mission (e.g. emergency response, hospital administration, etc) had far less to do with the team dynamic than the size of the team.

Because of the (poor) security situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), expat (including from other African countries and including Congolese from other parts of the country) MSF staffers live for the most part in guarded compounds, and don't go out after dark. An exception is Kinshasa, and during the time I was there, Bunia, in Ituri province (Bunia has not seen heavy fighting since 2003, and is the site of a large encampment of United Nations peacekeepers).

Elsewhere, however, staffers are "home" well before dark, and because in many places Internet connections are via (expensive) satellite phone, no one spends the evening on Facebook.

The best team dynamic I saw during my trip was in Nyanzale, where a small team of men and women from three continents (a Frenchman, an American and Africans from at least three different countries) operate a reference clinic providing support to Nyanzale town and to 33 smaller, less well-equipped clinics in surrounding towns and villages.

[The photos above show the Nyanzale team in their compound, where for two of the three days I was there, we didn't have electricity, thanks to a broken generator and an AWOL backup generator. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are taken at the outdoor table, which doubles as a coffee shop (sorry, Nescafe only) and "business center". The last photo shows the team, plus two visitors from MSF's Paris headquarters – Danielle, at left, and Isabelle, center in orange.]

In (large?) part, a team dynamic comes down to the team leader and the individual team members, but from what I could see (and I saw this also with the MSF operations in Kabizo and Gety), small team size makes it difficult for people to form cliques. Also, nightly lockdown and a lack of outside entertainment mean that people spend virtually all their time with one another, eating, drinking and talking, learning to respect one another and of necessity, learning to get along.

Obviously there must be instances of toxic personalities poisoning a team atmosphere, but I didn't see any of that. What I did see was more social fragmentation in the larger MSF operations I visited; self-selection into groups of bon vivants and non vivants (joke), Francophones and non-native French speakers, etc. As a visiting outsider, I was instantly and warmly welcomed into the social matrix of the smaller operations; at larger operations I saw the teams break into different groups every evening, and it was easy to imagine that every evening, the groups were the same.

I'm not saying the level of professionalism is different in smaller and larger operations; I just know where I'd prefer to work.