The 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player

The Best Players

Although a team can lose if it has great players, it can’t win without them. Yet individual talent alone does not guarantee success. Once you’ve attracted the right people to your team, you must help them mature into team players. How do you accomplish this? In fact, you have two choices: You can either develop these people yourself or you can recruit new people who are already top-notch team members.

True team players have 17 key traits, as exemplified by well-known personalities from history or contemporary society. They are:

1. “Adaptable”

Quincy Jones is one of the biggest names in the music industry. He has performed, composed, arranged, produced, collaborated, directed and founded businesses. He excelled in each area because he was able to adapt to working with many different kinds of groups. His emotional confidence and creativity enabled him to transfer prior knowledge seamlessly to new endeavors. “I take everybody one-on-one and I’m happy,” Jones explains. He exemplifies the adaptable team member, someone creative who can learn, has a sense of security and knows how to be flexible.

Napoleon Bonaparte once explained to an...