One of the 24 character strengths
Pulling your weight as part of a group — turning up, backing the people in it, and taking the group's decisions seriously.
Teamwork is the strength of being genuinely part of a group: turning up, backing the people in it, and taking its decisions seriously.
The visible part is reliability. Somebody who leads here is where they said they would be, and has done the piece they said they would do. Nobody needs to chase them. That sounds unremarkable until a group contains somebody who is not.
The less visible part is accepting outcomes that went against them. A group decision that this person argued hard against still gets their full effort afterwards, and that is where this strength is genuinely tested.
It travels well beyond work. The same instinct shows up in a five-a-side team, a book group and a family, because what it is really about is what somebody owes a thing they chose to join.
Curious which of these lead in you? Take the free assessment and find out.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentThe rota puts them on the worst shift for the third month running, and everybody can see it. They take it without mentioning it, turn up on time, and stay late when the handover overruns.
Loyalty to a group can outlast the group deserving it. A badly run team keeps its members here longest. The shortfall left by everybody else gets quietly absorbed, and leaving registers as a betrayal rather than as a reasonable option.
It gets read as going along with things, or as having no independent view. Neither fits: this strength is entirely compatible with arguing forcefully inside the group, and the argument is usually a sign of it rather than the opposite.
Like Self-Regulation, most of the questions behind it ask about pulling away from a group rather than pulling with it, so a placing near the top partly reflects things somebody does not do.
Both are about being good in a group. Teamwork is pulling your weight inside it; Leadership is taking responsibility for how the whole thing runs.
Both are about a person's obligations to others. Teamwork is loyalty to a particular group; Fairness is a standard that applies whether or not somebody is in it.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
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