How to become a great team player

 

By 

Epiphania Kimaro

Summary

·         The social-know-how is the foundation for effective teamwork

Being a great team player is an important quality both at work and at home. Look at job advertisements – ‘we are looking for someone who can work in a team’, they would say. But what does it mean to be a great team player and how do we become one? Beyond having the skills and intentions to contribute to...

a team’s effort, the technical know-how; being a great team player also means that you have the social know-how to make others want to, and enjoy working with you. In fact, the social-know-how is the foundation for effective teamwork, and here are some ways to achieve that.

Seek and accept help

Effective teamwork is about fostering good working relationships and one of the key ingredients for that is authenticity. Authenticity means that we come as we are, and unashamed – normal, imperfect human beings! We don’t fake it. We are okay with showing our team our strengths but also our vulnerabilities. We resist the urge to want to have all the answers. This is not easy of course, especially in a winner-takes-it-all culture where knowing and winning is celebrated; while not knowing and losing is shunned. But that is exactly where the catch is - we forget that the essence of having other people around us is so that we can complement each other. Proverbs 27:17 says this so eloquently: “as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”  And what happens when iron is sharpened? It becomes better. How liberating! Go and claim your team’s role to make you better. Do the same for them. Yes, the first thing to becoming a good team player is to know this basic tenet; that through others, we always have room to become better and to enter this room we must put on the shoes of authenticity.

Identify and nurture commonalities

Our commonalities are goldmines. When we meet others, our natural biases may push us to focus more on ourselves – we want to share what we stand for, what we have achieved, etc. But as Dale Carnegie reminds us in the influential book How to Win Friends and Influence People, the best chance we have at building good relationships is by identifying what others have in common with us, and building on that. Whether it is worldviews or taste of music, what you have in common with others is such a fruitful pathway to being a great team player. As organizations encourage their sales teams to KYC - Know Your Customer, I would encourage you to KYT, Know Your Team. Be curious about them and take genuine interest to know what makes them tick, and you will surely find a goldmine.

Listen well

Sawubona! This Zulu greeting translates to “I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being” – how heart-warming! Indeed, the best gift we can give another human being is seeing them.

Beyond greeting, we do that by listening to them.  Showing that we want to give someone else our undivided attention is a big show of humility. We make the other person feel important and as a result, we are most likely to work productively with them.

Engage the greatness in others

One of my favourite definitions of leadership is by author Susan Colantuono: “Leadership is using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain great outcomes by engaging the greatness in others.” And what I know for sure is that great leaders must also be great team players. This means that when we can focus outward and support our team members to succeed in their roles, we are cultivating the greatness in them and building our own greatness in the process.

Avoid the blame game

Blaming feels good because it kicks the uncomfortable ball of responsibility from our court to the other person’s when something goes wrong. But alas! Blame game never has a winner and it does not make us great team players. A good team player knows that when something goes wrong the first step is to find solutions, join hands on the deck, not witch-hunt. At a later point, they conduct what Agile project management call a retrospective. They identify root causes and take corrective and preventive measures to prevent recurrence of issues. Go and be a great team player. Sawubona!  Cheers!