You’re on a team and you want to do amazing things, like gain recognition for your work and be valued as a genius in your field, so don’t screw it up! Your relationships with fellow team members are the most vital to accomplishing your tasks, meeting your deadlines, and exceeding company goals. We’ve been doing this whole teamwork thing for a while now and want to share our secrets for success so you and your team can complete projects in such a way that all future company projects will bow down in admiration of your work.
So here are our top 10 tips for being awesome to each other with working on a team:
1. Trust yourself, trust your teammates, and stand by one another when issues or mistakes arise.
2. Show up, own your work, and do it to the best of your abilities. This builds trust.
3. Recognize and respect the efforts and ideas of others. With this, it is also important to give credit where credit is due. If you wrote an amazing proposal, but your colleague proofread it and fixed errors that ensured your work was taken seriously, share credit with your proofreader.
4. Be able to offer and accept constructive criticism. Not overtly negative comments, but feedback that enriches the process and helps you improve what you’ve done in a targeted manner.
5. Share the goals of the team and work toward them. If you complete what you need to do, offer to help a colleague with a different task.
6. Know what you are responsible for accomplishing and realize what your colleagues need to do. This means everyone has clear expectations set and can work toward them independently while collaborating where tasks overlap.
7. Communicate! Never presume a colleague or customer understands what you’re planning, or the work you’ve done.
8. Recognize the skills and talents of your teammates and use them to further your project. If you have a team member who is great at sketching, mocking up your chart or visual needs to give to the graphics department, it may cut down on the time it takes for graphics to complete the final artwork, making the whole team look like superstars!
9. Support and respect one another, never undermine with petty jealousy, prejudice, gossip, or begrudgery.
10. Divide the tasks proportionately among team members. Understand where there is overlap and plan ahead to work together on those points so they don’t become a workplace version of hot potato. It all comes down to respect for yourself, respect for your work, and respect for your colleagues. If you follow these top 10 tips, there’s no telling what you and your team can accomplish.
Wait, why are these lists always 10? One more for good measure. What tip would you add to make this one go to 11?