Being a Teammate

Keywords: teammates, team, work, selflessness, sports

Being a “Good” Teammate

It is human nature to think about your success and what benefits you as an individual first in most life situations. That mentality is what sometimes pushes individuals to be there best in most aspects of their personal life. That mentality is great for a person to make life decisions involving themselves, but what about in a group environment? When I say a group environment, I mean most jobs, sports, or even group projects. Since I am a college athlete, who has participated in athletics since the age of 4, I will use many sports examples. These rules and ideas are for any group that is trying to reach one common goal. That is called a “team” and I will discuss how to be a good teammate. Anybody can be part of a team, but there are characteristics and mindsets that separate a good teammate from other teammates.  The key components to be a good teammate are selflessness, knowing and fitting your role, and versatility.

(Photo By: Andrew Kurzawski)

Selflessness

When you are joining other individuals to accomplish a common goal, you must learn to put the team’s best interest before your own. Therefore, selflessness comes in as the number one trait for a good teammate. You must have concern about the needs of others before your own. Let’s analyze this characteristic in some real-life scenarios.

For example, I am a basketball player whose strength is shooting two-point shots and attacking close to the rim, but my team is down three with very little time remaining. Let’s say I had a personal goal to score 30 points and I have 28 points with this time remaining. My team needs a three-pointer– which isn’t one of my strengths– so now I have some decisions to make. I could try to be the hero and shoot a three-pointer and pray that it goes in. I could also attack the rim, take a loss, and probably score two points and reach my individual goal finishing with exactly 30 points. Or I could find are better three-point shooters play the percentages that would give our team the best chance to tie the game and give us a chance to fight for the win. The selfless answer is the final option and that’s one characteristic of being a good teammate.

For the non-sports-lovers, I will give one more example. Let’s say you work at an automobile plant as a line worker. The goal for today as a team is to complete 100 cars. You are the most experienced and efficient worker out of your five crew members. You all should complete 20 cars a piece that day to come out with the end goal. You are done with your 20 cars with a significant amount of time left and see that two of your other colleagues are struggling to reach their individual goal. You could always stop and say, “I’m tired, I’ve done my part”. You could also start criticizing and attacking them while not giving a helping hand, or you could do extra work and help the team complete the goal. The final answer is the selfless answer and would be a key contributor to be a good teammate.

Playing Your Role

When trying to accomplish a goal with a group of individuals, all individuals must understand what must be done to complete this goal. There will be little tasks and bigger tasks but to accomplish the goal in the most efficient way, there must be roles given to everyone. In order to determine roles, there must be self-evaluation and also a team evaluation of strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes when we evaluate ourselves, we tend to think we are better than we are at a task so it’s always better to have a leader evaluate your strengths and put you in a role. Sometimes you are extremely talented and good at something but just for that team you are better off taking a step back. The point of evaluating strengths and weaknesses, is to find out where individuals fit best to make the team more effective at performing accomplishing the common goal.

For example, in any team sport that you participate in there are various roles that must be filled to make a team successful. To keep it simple, I will break down the roles of a basketball team. In basketball, you only have five starters and five players in at a time. Teams typically consist of an average of 10-15 players. If you are a player that comes off the bench and doesn’t start you must still be fully engaged in that role. If a coach asks you to come in off the bench and play a lot, you must go in for your little time and give the team a spark no matter how long you are used for. Also, you must understand what the coach is asking for you to be for the team. If you are great on defense and not so much at scoring, you should play great defense and stay within yourself and not try to score as much. It all falls back to selflessness because maybe you can score more but you must stay within the teams needs for you so that they would be most effective.

Roles in a workplace are easier defined. I will use a newscast to explain it. When putting together a movie you have many different people fill different roles. You have directors, producers, talent, and many technical people. Producers come up with the show and story ideas. Directors make sure the producers plan is executed properly. The talent is just who the people see relaying the stories to the audience. There are people who handle cameras, microphones, and any other technical things to run a successful show. Each play a role in coming together to deliver a successful news show. The talent may receive all the fame and notoriety but if everyone is selfless and focused on the team this will contribute to a team full of good teammates.

Versatility

The last two topics are very important to understanding how to contribute to a team but this one is what will set individuals apart from others in a team environment. The ability to adapt to multiple functions and activities in a group environment could set you apart as a teammate. The reason versatility has so much importance is because this is where you get to show more of yourself as an individual. In any sport, group project, or workplace there will come a time when things don’t go as planned. In sports, we see injuries or a lack of production from someone in a certain role. A good teammate is one who can step up and fill another’s role for the greater good of the team when asked too in adverse situations. In a workplace you could have illness, personal reasons, lack of production, or injury as well and an individual could have to step up in a different role. When you show versatility you as an individual makes yourself more valuable but also brings a key factor to a team. Versatility in sports is great because in a team sports coaches look for a “Next Man Up” mentality.

Are You Ready to be a Good Teammate?

There are many other contributing factors to be a good teammate. I just gave a few examples and important characteristics that I find very useful for me daily. But most of the things I didn’t touch on were just personality traits and just comes with being a good person. But never forget these lessons and always understand “there isn’t any I’s in team.”