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There are two ways a team can optimize their work, either for individual throughput, or for group-throughput. The latter is far superior and requries everyone to unblock others first, before going back to focus on one's own work.

Here's why:

For the sake of argument let's assume an idealized team where all team members are equal in terms of skillset, so they can each take on every piece of work that needs to be done. This could be a team of software developers with a similar level of experience.

If each individual optimizes for their own throughput, this is what happens:

• A single individual gets stuck, needs a review, feedback or similar and asks for help. They still try to solve it on their own but do not make any more progress.
• All the other individuals prioritize their own work and want to get their piece finished before helping the stuck person.
• At some point in time, the next individual gets stuck, similar to the first. But they do not help each other and instead continue to work on their own issues.
• Sometimes, an individual may finish their piece of work and help a stuck individual bevore picking up something new. But this happens less often than people getting stuck.
• Eventually, all individuals are stuck.

Needless to say that team throughput suffers a lot in this scenario. In addition, knowledge silos can persist since individuals rarely work with each other.

If team members for group-throughput, e. g. “unblock others first”, this is what happens:

• A person gets stuck and asks for help, same as above.
• Another person drops their task and starts helping this person, e. g. by performing a review, giving feedback, pairing on a difficult issue etc. This second person loses focus and needs to context-switch, which creates friction and loses some time.
• The first person becomes “unstuck” and can continue on their own. The second person returns to their work (another context-switch).
• The overall time of individuals spent stuck is reduced tremendously, trading it off for the cost of context-switches when somebody starts helping another person.

Team throughput will be a lot better than in the first scenario, and knowledge silos will disappear over time, since every time a person helps another person, there will be knowledge transfer and additional empathy.

But there's more: In teams where all work is done in pairs or even groups of people, there will be even less chance to get stuck, and even more chance to learn from each other.

I'd recommend educating and encouraging your teams to “unblock others first” as a general principle. It will start a journey of improvement, satisfaction and accomplishment across the board.