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Team player?

Reader question:

When an employee is described as “a team player every company wants”, what does it mean exactly?

My comments:

“Team player” is literally a member of a team. As a member of a team, you’re supposed to work with others in order for the team to succeed.

This is easier to understand in sport, I think, than in a business company. In sports, you see, there are team sports and individual sports. Basketball, for example, is a team sport featuring five players playing against five others on an opposing team. Golf, on the other hand, is an individual sport, in which players compete against each other individually.

In golf, you don’t have to worry about anyone else except yourself but in basketball the objective is for teammates to help each other and find the best opportunity to score, by tossing the ball through the basket.

Anyone on your team scores and your team earn the point or points, as the case may be. This means you don’t have to score all the points – hence the importance of team work, passing the ball around in order to find the player who is in the best position to score.

Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers star who’s just retired, is NOT known for being a team player. He doesn’t seem to understand that when a teammate scores, he gets the credit, too. It sometimes appears that he wants to score all the points. In his last game a week ago, for example, he shot the ball 50 times while all the rest of the team shot 35. Kobe shot from beyond the three-point line 21 times, with his teammates combining for a grand total of 4.