How To Identify A Team-Player In The Workplace

In today’s fast paced corporate environment, the ability to be a competent team player is an invaluable skill. Walk into almost any office and it will have an open-plan design, a layout intended to facilitate communication, cooperation and teamwork. But there’s a big difference between creating a team and creating teamwork, just as there is a big difference between joining a team and performing as a team member.

The Magic’s In The Team

Teamwork isn’t for everyone, and we can all think of someone who would rather do their own thing than contribute to the efforts of the group. But research tells us how an effective team delivers far higher performance than when individuals complete the same tasks (our assessments actually have sophisticated ways of assessing people to determine how effectively they will work as part of a team and how the team will perform as a whole).

How To Discover A Team-Player

A good place to start when looking at an individual’s proficiency for team working is their personality.  For example, looking at an individual’s strength of preference for certain traits such as dominance, warmth, trusting, and group orientation gives an indication of how likely they are to enjoy working as part of a group.

Equally, when using leadership levels to benchmark, you can assess people against criteria at the appropriate level. For example, an individual contributor will need to be effective in working as part of a team. A more senior individual however will need to be able to lead a team and achieve results through the direction of others’ efforts.

If you already have a team of people and want to measure how effectively they are at working together and where there might be room for improvement, then you need to assess and analyse the whole group. Organisations have used PeopleFactors’s assessments to measure individuals to improve almost every metric of team work. Take one of our assessments for a spin with our on-demand service.