A friend of mine was awoken early Saturday morning by an alert on his phone. It was a text message notifying him of suspected fraudulent charges on his credit card.
He immediately called his credit card company, and sure enough, someone had stolen his information and had been making fraudulent online purchases during the wee hours of the morning.
My friend was understandably frustrated. But in the big scheme of things, his ordeal turned out to be not much more than an unfortunate inconvenience. He wasn’t held responsible for any of the fraudulent charges. The credit card company canceled his stolen card and mailed him a new card. And they assured him that the incident would not have a negative effect on his credit rating.
Sadly, incidents of this nature are now so common that his credit card company didn’t even seem to be that bothered by it.
However, the inconvenience of having to wait for his new card to arrive and of having to track down and update all the automatic billing accounts tied to his former card had caused him unnecessary stress.
My friend has a kind heart and he’s almost generous to a fault. During the investigation, he got to see some of the fraudulent purchases that the person who stole his card had made, and my friend mentioned to me that none of those purchases appeared to be anything extravagant.
He commented, “If they really needed that stuff and they had just asked me, I probably would have bought it for them.”
I suspect there a lot of good teammates in this world who would also respond that way.
In fact, my friend’s credit card ordeal captures one of the primary differences between good teammates and teambusters—individuals whose selfishness busts their team.
Teambusters hate to be inconvenienced by others. Yet, they never seem to mind inconveniencing others in pursuit of their own interests. They don’t think about, or even care about, how their actions affect anybody else on their team.
Comparatively, good teammates go out of their way to never inconvenience others. They make it a point to not cause others unnecessary stress. Yet, they amazingly never seem to mind being inconvenienced by someone or something that benefits their team.
A good teammate’s attitude when it comes to the issue of inconvenience is uncommon. It is one of the things that makes these individuals so special and so valuable to their team’s culture.
It’s how they show how much they care.
As always…Good teammates care. Good teammates share. Good teammates listen. Go be a good teammate.
