How to be a good teammate

If you were to sum up this article in one sentence, it would be this: Be proactive. If you'd ask me to give me a more detailed explanation I would tell you this:

I think there are an infinite number of ways to be a good teammate. In my opinion the most important ones are the following four:

1. Being proactive
2. Helping your teammates
3. Asking for help
4. Communicating well

Being proactive

The most important thing about being a good teammate is to be proactive. Being proactive means taking the initiative and making things happen. Here's a couple of examples:

• If you see a problem, fix it.
• If you don't know, what to do, don't ask "What should I do?". Think about what you could do and ask "I have the following challenges. Here's what I think I could do. What do you think?"
• If you see an opportunity, take it. By being proactive, you'll make your teammates life easier. You'll also learn a lot more, because you'll be doing more.

Helping your teammates

Whenever you can, help your teammates. This is an investment in your future. Helping your teammates makes them more likely to help you in the future. There's a tradeoff here: if you help your teammates too much, some might stop thinking for themselves.

It it is a one time task, that you can do in a couple of minutes, just do it. If there is something that occurs regularly, show them how to do it themselves. Better yet, show them how to figure it out themselves.

How to ask for help

There's only so much you can do yourself. In many situations you'll need to ask your teammates for help. When asking for help, there's two extremes: not asking at all and asking instead of thinking. Both are bad.

When you're not asking at all, you'll get stuck and can't make progress. This is bad for you and your teammates, because they will then have to do your work.

When you're asking instead of thinking, you're wasting your teammates time. You want to be somewhere in the middle.

The best way to do this is, to make a genuine effort to solve the problem yourself. If you can't solve it, you can ask your teammates for help.

When asking for help, you should explain what you've tried and why it didn't work. Explain it in a detailed yet concise way. If you're not writing detailed enough, your teammates will have to ask you for more details. If you're writing too much, your teammates will have to read more than necessary.

Start by writing it as detailed as possible. Once you're done, read it again and remove everything that's not necessary. In many cases, you'll find the solution yourself while writing the question.

This way you'll learn something and you save your teammates time. If you don't find the solution yourself, you'll have a good question to ask your teammates.

Communicating well

It is better to overcommunicate than to undercommunicate. So if you're not sure, if you should communicate something, do it. Be radically transparent. Everybody should know, what's on your mind.

Conclusion

There's infinitely more ways to be a good teammate. But if you just stick to those four points, your teammates will love you and you'll be doing great work.