When you are part of a team, you build your character and your reputation; learn compassion and responsiveness, and finally achieve your goals and objectives. All of these acquisitions and accomplishments are essential to your personal success. The ABC of a team player is found in the same ABC acronym: ardor, believability, and commitment.
The heart of being a valuable teammate is thus exhibiting collaborative skills at work that involve a willingness to give more than 100 percent. It calls for pulling along well with others and an honest demonstration of trustworthiness. How can you develop your collaborative skills at work? Some tips are:
1. Be Humble, Courteous & Deferential
As a team member, you have to value and appreciate concepts and propositions put across by others. You may have strong reservations about them alright, but vehemently turning them down ab initio will project you in poor light. Instead, you should make efforts to understand more about them and request for detailed consideration to obviate your apprehensions.
Any tendency to pass facetious or offhand remarks may harm the very foundation of a team and brand you as an unhelpful and truculent teammate. Remember that your willingness to compromise with the viewpoints of others and cooperation in common tasks boost your team’s chances of success. And when your team succeeds, you too succeed.
2. Be Tolerant, Impartial & Flexible
When you function in a team, the experience that you get is one of honor, accolades, and development. You get to hear different standpoints, become aware of varying outlooks, and perceptive to diverse ideas; all these augment your knowledge base and widen your horizon. The happenings that you go through as part of a team are immensely rewarding, particularly when you do not have any blinders vis-a-vis ideas put forth by and involvements of others.
The aim of working together is working towards a common vision and a common objective. And if that has to fructify, every team member has to enjoy that feeling of security in sharing individual thoughts and standpoints. The more alive and well they feel ki voicing their views, the more remarkable and undisputable their inputs will be. A tolerant impartial and flexible disposition on your part will bring about an upbeat and novel milieu that will facilitate everyone appreciates the viewpoints of others.
3. Don’t Hoard Information & Hold Back Your Views
They say that knowledge is like money; to be of value it must circulate and in circulating it increases. During the course of your work or outside it, you could have hit upon some data that you feel can be used to advantage by one of your co-workers. It is possible that you need expert advice or uses somebody else’s experience to get along with a task that has been assigned to you.
Now, such revelations should not be held back. You must share whatever you have or need with the concerned people. And when you begin doing so, you will see for yourself that people will come to you on their own. They will willingly provide you information that they have and which can be used by you.
As the process takes shape, you will start receiving requests to attend conferences and brain-storming sessions wherein you could share your knowledge and opinions. The fact is that all knowledge is connected to all other knowledge; and the greatest benefit accrues when you make those connections. Sharing your knowledge with others will not make you less important; on the contrary, your act of sharing it will serve to act as the fuel for your team’s and your own growth engine.
4. Acknowledge Contributions Made by Others
There are innumerable instances when our individual attainments and triumphs have been a result of assistance or advice rendered by others. You need to ponder over the positive effect of a congratulatory message on your achieving something, more so when hard work and effort put in by you is appreciated. Every human being wants positive reception and recognition.
When you acknowledge contributions made by others, it shows off your wisdom, sensibleness, and effectiveness. You thus get to nurture excellent working associations and help to generate a pleasant and optimistic working atmosphere. Remember that giving credit where credit is due is a very worthwhile habit to form; its returns are fathomless. The more credit you give away, the more will come back to you. When you appreciate others, you make excellence in them your own property. Hence, besides proving yourself to be a good team player, you also stand to benefit individually.
Doesn’t it take two flints to make a fire? Unity is always a strength and when there are teamwork and collaboration, superb things can be achieved. The word ‘we’ is extremely important because it manifests and signifies power. Perhaps that explains why sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.
No one can whistle a symphony; it takes a whole orchestra to play it. The contribution of every team member is very important because, upon his or her conduct, the fate of others is dependent. Teamwork invariably begins with the individual. Therefore, you have to be a valuable teammate.
[ Also Checkout: How Do You Rectify a Mistake at Work? ]
