What is the Ideal Team Player?

Ralph and Cindy share their experience of working with hundreds of corporate teams and offer their assessment of the mindset and behavior characteristics common to the best team players.

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Welcome to the GetEmergent podcast. This is a podcast about leadership development, improving communication and enhancing team performance. I’m Cindy Massengill and I’m Ralph Simone. We’d love this topic today. The ideal team player, we get a lot of questions about what makes for the best team player.

And I’m hard-pressed not to say, just do what I do because I think I have. The ideal team player, but that statement in itself is problematic. Right? And it would make for a short podcast. It would. But if I have that high of an opinion of myself, I may not be open to differences of other people. Right. And I, and I think that our ego often gets in the way of being a really good team.

We’ve worked with a lot of teams and it’s given me the opportunity to really watch the interactions with all different types of people in different sizes of teams and how people really perform together effectively and not effectively. And there’s gosh, there are so many nuances to that human interaction.

There are, but we think if we organize it by really two areas, there’s a certain mindset than an effective team player brings into a group environment. I’m going to say because it, uh, you know, bringing people together does not make them a team. Right. And then there’s the behaviors that are required for a teammate or a team player to be effective in that team or group.

I agree. Agreed. You know, we’ve had a lot of years of experience in not just working with individuals and organizations but working with a lot of teams. And that experience has really taught us that there’s some highlighted bullets under both mindset and behaviors that we wanted to share with our followers today.

Why don’t we start with. I’d love to start with nights, because I think what we know is that our behavior flows out of our paradigms and our mindset. And so we’re not going to have the behavior of effective team player if we don’t first start with the mindset. So what’s the first thing that we think is critical in the mindset to be a, an effective or ideal team player.

So, it’s around appreciating different. And to be more specific, it’s an ideal team player really sees how your strengths might be different than my strengths. I have different gifts that you bring to the table, but I realize that we’re better to get. Absolutely. Not only do they allow for them, they actually embrace and celebrate and expect them as opposed to just giving lip service to the differences because sometimes the differences end up in conflict.

And I think the other thing is that they understand that they must subordinate their ego, their identity for the team’s identity and performance. That’s critical. I think to being an ideal team, And I think as part of this around appreciating differences, they also care about me as a person. You know, that’s part of this whole thing.

They, you know, the work is really important, but they also care about me and my contribution and who I am as a person. I think one of the things that we have to look at as team players on teams is how much are we stuck in the independent versus the interdependent paradigm? You know, me versus. And it reminds me.

And for those of you, uh, you know, Americans that were around in 1980, we remember the 1980 us Olympic team, you kno