When was the last time you reached out to someone you worked with and said, “Hey, this is something I’m bad at, and you’re really good at. Can you do it instead?”

What does that sentence make you feel?

Does it make you feel like you’re becoming vulnerable? “What if she gets the promotion and not me?”

Does it make you feel like your manager will think you’re not showing initiative by learning skills others have in the team?

Whenever I see someone thinking like this, I like to think about a game I used to play as a child. It’s an old computer game called Commando. It had a small unit of commandos who’d go do covert missions. You couldn’t Age-of-Empires your way through the battlefield. You’d get 2 or 3 soldiers who each had a particular set of skills. You as the player knew each of their strengths and knew when to use them. They were a team, but not the sort that you see at your workplace. They were a unit, a crew.

Not a lot of people open up to their team members that way. Have you ever thought about what your strengths are that a team could leverage? What about your weaknesses? Do you ever try to find a team to fit into that could use your strengths and aid your weaknesses? Would talking like this hinder your chances at a job interview?

Somehow, a lot of people consider this a vulnerability. Build a crew, a band, not a team that only comes together at a standup and only builds what is needed to get an Exceeds Expectations on an arbitrary review scale.

How do you begin though? I ask my team members constantly if I can add to their documentation. I’ve made PRs which merely clean up code, improving how readable it is. PRs I built in my free time. It doesn’t take me much time, and by that I certainly do not mean it would take others more time. It’s something I’m darned good at, and I do not feel that the team “owes me one” for doing it. I’m doing it because we’re all chipping away at the same rock, trying to make something. If some tasks are less glorious but improve things long-term, then so be it. If you work alongside sculptors, it doesn’t hurt to be the one to offer to sharpen their chisels.

Be a crew. Build a crew. Find a crew.