Bethan Blakeley: Embrace the team sport

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I love team sports. I love watching them (apart from cricket, because who has time for that?), and I love playing them. I love the mentality – coming together to achieve something, with each individual playing their own important role.

It wasn’t until recently, however, that I was introduced to the idea of thinking about your work as a team sport. I’m not talking about the standard drivel of “we’re a team, we’re a family, we work together, blah blah blah” that all companies seem to peddle nowadays (we’ll park that rant for another day). I’m talking about specialist skills. Expertise. I was having my usual imposter syndrome-fuelled panic of “I’m not good enough at X, Y, Z; I need more training in A, B, C; I’ll never truly succeed until I master this, that and the other”. And it hit me. What if I didn’t need to master all of those things to be successful?

Standing on the hockey pitch, I would never expect ...