Our culture of individualism pushes each person to try to be a star. “Team player” has even come to have the negative implication of subverting one’s own well-being and best advantage, and maybe even becoming invisible to leadership.
To counteract these possibly negative effects of selfless invisible toiling, people often strive to make sure leadership sees their individual achievements. But research shows that the culture of individual stars is not what leads to team success. A McKinsey study found that superstar individuals often do not create the best teams: Thinking about themselves first leads to behaviors that disrupt team trust and problem-solving.
Google’s Project Aristotle concluded that the best teams didn’t just consist of the smartest people, but instead, were the teams with high trust and listening practices that allowed everyone to take risks and ask questions.
As any passive-aggressive comment in a meeting demonstrates, the importance of how team members interact is central to team success. A large-scale study led by Nico Elbert from the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg even showed that some individuals consistently improve team outcomes through improving social interactions, even if those individuals’ technical skills are not the best on the team.
Over my career, which includes serving as the lead of the NASA Psyche mission, which had a $1 billion budget, and professor and a director of UC Berkeley’s 250-person Space Sciences Laboratory, I’ve personally seen how the best teams are ones that are comprised of people who are simultaneously great team players and superstars.
Five Key Skills to be a Great Team Player and a Superstar
The easiest place to make change that will help your team and make you a superstar is to start with yourself. Here are five things you can do to maximally advance your team and shine as an individual.
1. Speak clearly, calmly, and on topic.
Staying on topic makes your words maximally useful. Speaking clearly and calmly makes them maximally comprehensible. Stay calm, clear, and civil, and when the going gets tough, be even more calm, clear, and civil. If you keep the conversation on the topic and avoid anything personal, your teammates will feel safer and collaborate better. Christine Porath, Georgetown University business professor, says it well: Some people still think that being tough, distant, and domineering is the way to be respected as a leader. Studies show repeatedly, though, that leaders who are calm, clear, civil, and respectful score 40 to 80 percent higher in social status, 23 percent higher in competence, and even 16 percent higher in power than do gruff, domineering leaders.
2. Recognize problems and take action
Recognizing problems and then solving them is the absolute heart of what a team is for. Teams need to be masters at identifying and detailing problems—and this is the job of every individual, whether the problem is in their area or not.
On the NASA Psyche deep-space probe mission that I lead, we have a motto: The best news is bad news brought early. Early enough, that is, to solve it in time. And how do you make sure you get that good, bad news?
Think for a minute about who is most likely to find problems. Is it the CEO or the top leadership? No, it’s usually the person who has their hands on the processes, the person writing the code, or soldering the wire. The junior people. So you need a team that listens to the junior people, and you need everyone including the junior people to recognize problems and take actions. This is the biggest risk-reducer that I know of.
3. Do not give up
Instead of giving up, find a next step that you can see as progress, and dismiss the concept of failure. Acknowledge any mistakes and calmly move forward. Persisting means you are responsible, determined, reliable, and undaunted— all of which are critical to your own success, as well as the success of the team.
4. Create quality in all you do
In business, schedule and cost are often the drivers, and quality is fit in last as best it can. Quality is a kind of least common denominator—just as small as it can be. Is that the kind of world we really want to live in? But if you bring quality to all your actions (your response time, the clarity of your messages, the details of even your first drafts) you’ll inspire quality in others and you’ll be a standout.
5. Become an expert thinker
Metacognition is thinking about thinking, that is, your knowledge of your own thinking processes. The difference between regular thinking (that is, cognition) and metacognition is in its goal: Cognition learns for and does the task. Metacognition plans, monitors, evaluates, and strategizes.
Every day you walk down well-worn mental trails, processes that you’ve done over and over. The process might be organizing a meeting, it might be your own mental practice of identifying and solving problems, or the way you go about learning something new. Applying metacognition to these well-worn trails means thinking about how and why you do them and how they can be better.
Deanna Kuhn, faculty at Columbia University, describes metacognition as the slow replacement of less efficient thinking strategies with more effective processes to become a better and better thinker. It’s a mental self-improvement program that reaches into every aspect of your life.
You can examine your own work for these five characteristics, and you can bring these explicit skills to your team, if you are a leader already. Not only will you bring your team to the next level, but you’ll also become everyone’s MVP.
