You!

It is a great day, full of great things in stock for all of my readers. Today, I felt an urge to write about how you can become an excellent team player.  Are you a team player, tired of low performance and looking for a way out? Guess what! This post is for you. It’ll draw your attention to some important issues and help enhance your effectiveness and productivity on your team?

Here are some tips you should consider.

1. Collective and personal goal: No matter what your personal goals may be, ensure you are working towards the team’s goal which is the collective goal. Your personal goals should take its bearing from the team’s goal. Understand this; you can’t achieve anything without your team. Your team fails, you fail. So be committed to your team. Your personal success depends on your team’s success.

2. Take responsibility: If you want to be excellent player in any team, be prepared to take responsibilities.  In clearer words, you are responsible for writing your own story. After you must have done your own part of the task, be ready to cover up any lapses that may want to mar the success of your team. Give attention to little details because they have the power to enhance or mar the success of the whole project.

3. Know your strengths and weaknesses:  Being an excellent team player starts with you knowing yourself. How much do you know about yourself? You have to know your areas of strength and weakness. When you are aware of your strong points, it helps you select tasks in those areas. Wouldn’t it be unwise for me to operate in an area I have little or no skills? Knowing your weak points, helps you build yourself in those areas.

4. Stay enlightened:  To remain relevant to your team, you have to stay enlightened. You become irrelevant to your team at the point when someone on your team can perform ‘your own stunts’ better than you. Get my drift right; you need to continually stay in shape. Be the best at what you do. Bring something of value that nobody else brings to the table, and then you’ll be relevant and excellent. Research and discover new and better ways of achieving your personal goals and the team’s collective goals.

5. Have a work plan: To be excellent at what you do, work with an action plan that is time bound. It keeps you from being distracted. The truth that many people would have being more effective and productive if they had a plan of action. Ask yourself, ‘what sequence will the task take?’ Write it down! There is need for you to do the right thing at the right time. Your team should have a set time to achieve the common task. Don’t fix a time that is close to the team’s deadline; fix a time is quite behind to allow for evaluation and improvement.

6. Learn to communicate with other team players: It is so important that you communicate with other team players on how far you have performed your quota of the team’s project. Tell them about your successes and your challenges. Allow your team mates to input their suggestions on how the challenges can be surmounted (a man is never an island of knowledge.) Inform them about any adjustment or change in plan. Know that failure on your part to inform your team mates about a perceived loophole may mean failure of the team’s project.

7. Don’t procrastinate: Permit me to adopt the words of John C. Maxwell. He said, “Tomorrow will be a good tomorrow, if you do the right things today.” Don’t postpone what you ought to do today to a future day. Procrastination results stress. Plan your own part of the team task and act when you ought to. When you do, you save yourself from stress and likely embarrassment from disappointing people.

8. Get refreshed: Many people work tirelessly to achieve a goal, they often forget to rest. Nothing of great value can be achieved when you are tensed. Long hours of work take a great deal of energy. You have to take a break to get refreshed and to resume work with great enthusiasm. All work and no rest make you a dull, tensed and tired team player. Have a time to rest.

9. Appreciate yourself: When you achieve a task within the set time, don’t forget to appreciate yourself. Tell yourself wonderful things- well done, good job and so on. Better still; prepare a special meal for yourself.

10. Have an excellent mentality: Know that you are what you think you are. Your feelings and actions stems from your thoughts. When you are positive in your thinking, your feelings and your actions shows positivity. It has being well said that you can’t go beyond the level of your thinking. Enhance your thinking. Let thoughts of excellent standard spring out from you.

Hope this very post profit you? If yes, don’t hesitate to drop by next time. You can also leave your honest comment. Thanks.