On a collaborative team, a great employee should be a team player: helping their colleagues hit *their* individual priorities. Do favors for them, offer feedback when asked, build social capital. Whatever it takes to help the company succeed.
As Fred Kofman says, “Your job is not your job. Your job is to help the overall team/company win.” Fred’s diagnosis of much organizational dysfunction is that employees become too absorbed by their individual project list and lose sight of the common goal. His canonical example is that of a defender on a soccer team who thinks his job is to defend (not let the other team score goals) while his actual goal should be for his team to win the game.
Yet a star employee must *also* stay focused on nailing their own individual projects and KPIs. It’s possible to be too much of a team player — to the detriment of your own performance, which ultimately impacts the org and the workflows you’re responsible for. In this circumstance, you don’t set enough boundaries and you get “used” by your co-workers.
Senior, savvy operators tend to have good intuition on how to balance their time between “my KPIs” vs. “others’ KPIs”. When I’ve hired more senior people, their savviness at navigating the favor-trading dynamics that circulate inside every team — their understanding that they need to be a team player and also they need to nail their own task list and not get taken advantage of — sets them apart from less experienced folks.
It’s one of the things you pay for when hiring someone senior onto a team.