From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Be flexible about your role on a team

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Be flexible about your role on a team

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- There are so many things that need to be done within a team, and the team may only be two or three people, so everyone's going to have to contribute in a number of different ways. It's not going to be enough to say, well, that's what I do, and that's all I do. In fact, even your number one best skill, let's say it's keeping a track of all the details, might be someone else's number one best contribution as well. So you might not get to even do that. So flexibility of role is a useful feature in a team player, and it's worth being aware of this and trying to cultivate it in yourself. Basically, you start with knowing what you're best at, and then you also work out what your reserve choices are. Maybe you have one or two or even three other things that you can do well in a team, and then you can use your second or third choices if required. And you would do this consciously, you would think, I know I like to boss everyone around, but Louise is even more bossy than me and she's a good person, so I'll let her lead and I'll be one of the workers this time. Not easy sometimes. Just to give you a couple of examples, clearly leadership is something that you might let go of, even though it's your number one preferred role, or you might need to step up to it even though it's only third on your list, but there just isn't anyone else who wants to do it. Or you might decide to focus on coaching and helping the others instead of leading them from the front. Or you might decide to help with idea generation, even though you don't normally choose that first. Or you might notice that nobody else is thinking about what might go wrong and do that, or maybe nobody's paying attention to the detail or the cost or the time or the project planning. So how flexible are you? Do you always have a favorite role in every team task? And what are your two or three reserve roles that you could use instead? In order to help you, there's a list of possible team roles in the exercise files that you can download and think about.

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