How to be an Exceptional Team Player 🚀
Broken down into four main traits - especially relevant to very strong individual contributors who feel less productive on teams.
Quick update around the serialized posts I was dubbing subbatical (😬) around my sabbatical journey - they will still be happening in addition to the regular variety of posts. For now please enjoy my thoughts around being an exceptional team player.
This rant precipitated after I got off of a call with my brother where we were talking about some of the frustrations he was going through at work.
A lot of people—especially smart and competent people—routinely end up in situations where they feel that they are able to perform much better solo rather than in a team situation. More interestingly, this also seems to happen in a team of other smart and competent individuals.
In my experience, the traits that separate the average player from good (I use “player” as a placeholder—it could mean coworker, teammate, etc.) are different from the things that separate good from exceptional, especially in a team setting.
Defining our rating scale
AKA what does exceptional mean
Given a team of people with a collective goal in mind - say shipping a product, figuring out an issue or hitting a number, the team has a certain probability of success at the goal. If we add a new player onto this team, we could say that:
A below average player will significantly reduce the probability of success
An average player will lead to no significant change in probability of success and
With this in mind - an Exceptional player is someone who will significantly raise the probability of success for any team.
If you’re thinking down the lines of - wellll it depends on the size, type of people, goal etc etc. - don’t, it’s irrelevant to the rest of the post. As a rule of thumb, there are nuances to everything but that shouldn’t stop us from discussing broad strokes, especially in the individual frame of reference of yourself on a team of competent people.
The Makeup of a Team Player
There are four (or three depending on how you cut it up) ingredients that decide where you lie on the rating scale we discussed above. The first two are fairly intuitive and are collectively referred to as base competence. We will quickly mention them before moving into the meat of it in the latter two.
Base Competence
These traits directly affect the chances of success for an individual and only indirectly affect the team and as such, they tend to be individual specific and limited to the scope of themselves.
Talent and Work Ethic comprise Base Competence.
1. Talent
Call it aptitude, intelligence, creativity or whatever inherent trait relevant to the area of work - this is the most inert input into your output as a worker and sets your baseline for how you would perform on a task. This is generally considered sticky and hard to modify after a certain point of experience - though one can definitely improve “inherent” talent via…
2. Work Ethic
If your brain is thinking “~work smart not hard~” - you really do have to work smart AND hard. Since we are talking about being exceptional, there are no outs here - if you are skimping on either you are not exceptional. You may be good, but you are not exceptional.
Pretty self explanatory, are you putting in the work :D ?
The virtuous cycle of work
Talent can make up for work ethic and vice versa, though what’s great about the latter is that practicing it generally (and often immutably) improves the former and the latter. You get better at doing the thing and at doing things well in general.
Information Dynamics
These traits directly affect the chances of success for the team.
Subsets of this are dealing with feedback, giving feedback, team communication, etc - but the general principle is how you - as an individual - process incoming information and relay information outwards towards the team.
3. Processing information
Basically, all incoming information, communication, and feedback. Could allude to anything from metrics to indirect interactions with frustrated teammates to direct feedback received. If you’ve worked in a group of people i’m sure you’ve noticed various degrees of being able to take feedback from the world and improve themselves.
The below average player is incapable of processing information and improving their work.
The average player receives information and applies it to their work to varying effect. They are unable to discern between relevant and irrelevant information.
The good player parses out only the relevant information and applies it to their work.
The exceptional player does the former but is also able to extract relevant information out of the leftover information through existing knowledge, smart guesswork and/or other heuristics.
Both the average and the exceptional player try to use all information available but there’s a difference in their ability of discernment and mentality - an exceptional player with seek to use all information either now or in the future. They have a voracious curiosity for information AND ability to make use of it. They insist on making every piece of information work for them - even if they seemingly aren’t connected.
The best part of having this mentality is that you naturally start to separate out complicated interpersonal dynamics and/or emotions from base facts, which both improve your mood, outlook and if you are good at the next trait, improve team dynamic as well.
4. Communicating Outwards
In the previous subsection, exceptionalism centers around being able to heuristically raise the quality of information that you’re receiving to make it more useful than it would be to the average person.
In this section, we discuss helping raise the quality of information throughout the team so that everyone is getting more relevant information throughout their day. A few ways in which this can manifest is introducing or improving existing processes, nullifying status games, improving team morale or even stating preferences on how to receive information.
Intuitively, there are many more reasons why this is hard than this is easy.
Not everyone can figure out why the quality of information being passed around is low.
It is not easy to ask people to change their ways in a way that’ll be received well.
It is scary to raise your hand up and take accountability for suggesting a change to something as personal as how and what people are communicating.
One universal way I’ve seen exceptional players positively affect outcomes is by framing all the conversation happening within a team as:
“Hey! We all want the same thing - let’s figure out how to improve so we can achieve our goal”
as opposed to
“Hey, do this thing because it’s better and i’m smart” or “I want to do this thing because I want the credit for this thing”
In teams, depending on culture, the biggest issues boil down to power and social dynamics on top of background politics. Someone is desperate for a promotion or a raise, someone keeps taking credit for other work to pad their standing, someone keeps relevant information from a colleague so they fail and look better in comparison, etc.
The best teams minimize these traits by making sure that they hire exceptional people - who in turn don’t care about power dynamics. For exceptional players achieving the goal is top of mind and they make outsized efforts to ensure that stays the focus of the team.
Exceptional teammates tend to get recognized in most systems no matter how dysfunctional because as we discussed, they are able to improve the odds of success for everyone. Being able to affect change on this scale generally also presents these individuals with moving up into leadership to focus on the highest leverage traits for the team. Anyways, that was my more refined rant than what I subjected my brother to.
Yours
H