Know Your Role

"Know Your Role."

Some people hate the sound of that phrase. I blame it on the wrestling guy--I think it was The Rock--who made it sound like telling someone to "know your role" is effectively telling them to submit to you.

I think it's one of those phrases that can be a great for keeping people on track towards a group goal. I've played a lot of organized sports. In that respect, to "know your role" means to understand how you fit best into your group for the group's benefit. This can be difficult to do, especially when roles are not clearly defined. Often in business, youth sports, or even something as trivial as planning a group picnic, we aren't told exactly what to do, and it can be so hard to get to the point where you understand your duties perfectly, as well as the duties of others as they affect you, which is quite important. Sometimes we forget our exact role in a group and cross the boundaries of our responsibility, which can sometimes be good, but often isn't.

Everyone has experienced this at some point in their lives. I found that it happened quite a bit on projects in high school and college (even in grad school), and some of the little league teams I coached had this issue during the first few weeks of a season. You may be experiencing this kind of thing at work right now as you read this (man that guy in the next cube is a jerk...you tell him that YOU will do the talking on the next presentation and HE will be making the spreadsheets. Make sure he uses Trebuchet.).

There is no denying that learning how to do many different things--in effect, learning multiple roles--can be extremely effective at keeping yourself valuable AND helping your group achieve its goals. Take work presentations for example: if you only know how to make pie charts, and pie charts are deemed unnecessary because of a change in presentable metrics, well then you are out of luck and possibly out of a job. In the same sense, if Peter Presenter is the ONLY person on your team who knows how to present line graphs and he comes down with a case of the Flaps (it's a stomach virus) right before the big Profits vs. Time presentation, then your whole team is kinda screwed.

My feeling is that with most groups and teams, it's always good to have the starter as well as backups. Obviously this is the case in sports, but I think it applies to work as well. The starter will get most of the time at his best position--whether it's Left Field or Client Researcher or Presentation Closer--and the backups of course learn how to play the position by practicing and even assuming the role from time to time to get some real experience.

But back to the point here: you have to Know Your Role if you want to help the team (by "you" I mean the unspecific "you", not actually "you", but also "you" in addition to me). Even if you think your role is boring or you think you should have a different role, when the coach gives you a position, you have to suck it up and learn and play.

I'm writing about this now because of the upcoming Pacific Coptic Athletic League season. (What is the deal with all these basketball posts? It's not even one of my three favorite sports. I think it's because I am trying not to talk about it verbally so much--of course, it doesn't help that I'm writing about it now. *Sigh* I am going to play baseball next year.) Last year I played small forward, a position that I am really comfortable with: drive or shoot the 13-footer on offense, guard a mid-size guy on defense, and grab a ton of rebounds. Well, I did the last two well enough, but the shooting needed work.

Anyway, this year is going to be drastically different. We lost two key players to the East Coast: my brother Eddie who was our starting point guard, and Waseem, who was our starting shooting guard. Remember what I was saying earlier about having formidable backups? Well, we did. The problem is that THEY WERE BACKUPS FOR EACH OTHER. Whoops!

So after talking to our new head coach Walid, I'm moving over to point guard, barring assistant coach Mounir injecting horse steroids into his surgically-repaired knee before the season starts. It would seem that point guard is a nice place to get moved to--you get to handle the ball, and you're always in the action. Well, I've never been a good passer and I certainly don't have great ball handling skills. It's going to be a struggle.

This is why Coach Walid will keep telling me "Know Your Role" from now until August, and he'll keep telling everyone else that as well. I have to embrace taking the ball up the court just like other guys on the team have to embrace their roles as picksetters, hustle guys, rebounders, etcetera.

For a church basketball team, we have a long way to go. The two games that my brother missed last season ended in the highest-scoring defeat in league history as well as a loss to the last-place Sacramento Halos. Waseem was instrumental in the tempo of our offense. We are picking up a few big guys, and that should help, but all us returners have to understand our roles as we get closer to the start of the season.

So I won't get upset if I hear "Know Your Role!" on the court this spring and summer; in fact, it's one of our team mottos for this season, along with "Let's not lose 4 games by less than 4 points" and "Rohan make me a sandwich."