Teamwork in Diving: The Power of Clear Roles & Task Division

A lot of divers take teamwork as far as “stay close to your buddy and help each other out.”
This is a start but there is a lot more to it!

I heard about an incident recently where a tech diver had an equipment problem at depth and elected to deal with the issue completely on their own. This included: managing multiple bailout cylinders, deploying a DSMB, signalling to the boat on the surface, all while having a slightly higher stress level as a result of the problem. While the outcome was ok in that everybody survived without injury, as a result of doing everything themselves, the diver in question became task focussed and drifted away from the main group. They did have a team mate with them (which was a good thing) however the boat on the surface now had to monitor two groups of divers on decompression which wasn’t ideal and could have caused more problems had the conditions led to the groups drifting apart.

Effective teamwork in diving is about shared mental models, clear roles, and deliberate coordination. When everyone knows who is doing what and why, tasks flow smoothly, communication becomes sharper, and emergencies become manageable.

In diving, no matter whether you’re on a shallow reef, a deep trimix dive, or an open water course, good teams don’t happen by accident, they’re built through planning, discussion, and reflection.

One of the most practical ways to strengthen teamwork is to divide tasks and roles before the dive during the plan, confirm them during the brief, and then review how they worked afterwards during a debrief.

Let’s explore more.

Why Roles Matter Underwater

Humans love routine. It creates predictability and reduces cognitive load. But underwater, many divers fall into unspoken habits instead of intentional role assignment.

When roles aren’t explicit, a couple of issues can occur:

1. Duplication – Two divers do the same task, resulting in inefficiencies or confusion. In an emergency, everyone jumps in to help which doesn't help!
2. Omission – No one does a task because it gets forgotten or it is assumed someone else is doing it. Setting up for a photo in a large cave, nobody has tied, the group drifts away from the line into the blackness (this is a true story).

Recreational Diving

Recreational divers rarely think of “roles”, but they are there, especially as recreational dive groups may be relatively large. Even simple dives benefit from dividing tasks to create structure and reduce uncertainty. Here are roles recreational divers can assign:

Leader

Someone needs to be the leader underwater. They will (usually) be out in front of the group when on the move, responsible for navigation, setting the pace and deciding when to turn the dive.

‘Herder’

This is how you might describe the person at the back making sure the group is keeping up and staying together. This role especially comes in handy if the group has to reach certain points on a dive site within time/gas limits and can’t hang around looking in every nook and cranny on the reef! In poor visibility, they might have a torch or strobe so the leader can still communicate with them without having to be close enough to see clear hand signals.

Photographer(s)

Underwater photography is awesome and so many people these days are taking more and more amazing underwater images. The main issue from a teamwork point of view is that when you’re taking a photo, its not just the camera that gets focussed on the subject…. The reason I bring this up as a diving ‘role’ relates to planning and briefing how the team is going to work when the photographer(s) are taking their pictures; things you might want to think about:

• How does the group know when a photographer wants to stop and take a picture?
• How long do they have or how many pictures are they allowed for each subject before the group has to move on? (worth setting a limit here to avoid a mutiny!)
• What is the group going to do when the photos are happening?

Technical Diving

Tech diver groups tend to be smaller than recreational groups. While you will still need a leader and may have a photographer, it is less likely you’ll need a ‘herder’. There are a few other things a tech dive team may do that a recreational team is less likely to:

Line laying (cave/wreck)

This person (or these people) handles reels, spools, tie-offs, and checks. This role takes focus and discipline and needs to be done right.

DSMB deployment

If you’re going to deploy a DSMB, this might be one person or it might be several people. What is important is that you work out who is doing it and what order you’re deploying them. Like photography, DSMB deployment gets people focused so it is a good idea to do it one at a time and monitor each other as you’re deploying.

Strobe tie off

Strobes on shot lines are a really useful bit of kit when tech diving to help you get back to the shot line. If this role is given to someone on the descent then someone else can sort the shot out itself which makes more use of the bottom time available.

Shot setting

Following on from the strobe, the shot itself might need sorting out. This could mean securing it into a wreck or inflating the lift bag. I’ve always found it a good idea to partially inflate the bag before you set off on the dive such that as soon as you get back to the shot, you can start the ascent and not overrun your bottom time.

In tech diving and in recreational diving, it is a good idea to get people swapping roles over different dives. This maintains general levels of competency should they be needed unexpectedly. For example, if the person who is supposed to be putting up the DSMB has a tangle then someone else will need to be able to put theirs up. It is also important to know when things are going to be done by certain people. For example, if the boat skipper has said they want a DSMB on the surface at 30 minutes but the person primarily responsible is busy doing a gas switch then who takes over?

Instructional Diving

If you’re an instructor or a divemaster then the ‘standard’ roles won’t be a surprise to you: The instructor will demonstrate, teach and assess the skills of the student. The divemaster will provide support, often in the form of monitoring the rest of the group while the instructor is focussed on a student and perhaps dealing with minor issues. Ultimately, instructors and divemasters are leaders and you can read a lot more about that in these blogs:

https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-diving-instructors-leadership-creating-the-space-for-others-to-be-heard

https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/the-diving-professional-leadership-is-not-optional

https://www.thehumandiver.com/blog/top-tips-for-beginner-divers-leadership-and-followership

What we often don’t consider is the roles involved with being student. Team roles could include:

Gas pressure or No Decompression Limit (NDL) monitoring

Make sure people know what the limits/thresholds are for the dive, what is supposed to happen when those are reached and how to communicate them. A good thing to remember when considering communication is ‘closing the loop’. In context, if a student communicates their gas pressure to you then repeat the signal back (instead of  just responding with ‘ok’) to show you’ve understood it. This a team role because knowing the gas pressures within the team is part of building awareness which in turn informs decision making.

Positioning

Where do people need to be relative to their teammates and/or the leader? How will this vary depending on the conditions or phase of the dive? Beyond dive training, it is especially important to consider this when on descent and ascent in every dive you do. Any equipment or medical issues will often manifest on descent and I know of at least one fatality where the diver concerned was found unresponsive on the sea bed having been last seen on the surface over 10 minutes prior. If the team finds a fault on descent that a diver can’t deal with on their own, a team is far more likely to get a successful outcome. This all comes back to having appropriate positioning to be able to monitor each other on the descent.

With more advanced diver training courses then students may well duplicate roles. for example, you might have more than one diver monitoring navigation. As well as helping with training, a navigation backup provides redundancy if the single/primary navigator loses awareness for whatever reason. I actually did this on a tech dive a few months ago where I was leading but all 3 divers were unfamiliar with the location so we were all monitoring navigation and regularly confirming that our mental models matched in terms of how to get back to the shot line!

Discussing & Confirming Roles in the Pre-Dive Plan

Roles need to be discussed and confirmed before you get in the water. This might sound obvious but I’m sure you’ve witnessed groups of divers, especially in the recreational world, go diving with little more than a ‘follow me’. If there are no bad outcomes then this approach is seen as successful but when something goes wrong, it can lead to disaster.

Assigning roles takes less than five minutes but massively improves team performance. Questions to answer include:

• What are the roles?
• Who is doing each role? Do you need more than one person assigned to each role?
• What does the role involve? Does it involve communication between the team?

When planning roles, consider ‘What if?…..’

• What if someone can’t do the role during the dive?
  • The navigator gets lost.
  • The person deploying the DSMB is doing a gas switch
  • Who can take over? How will they know they have to take over?!
• Emergency plan

If someone has a problem, who is going to help? Top tip: you don’t want it to be everybody! Generally, the diver with the problem and their helper will, quite naturally, get focused on what they’re doing so it’s important that whoever isn’t directly helping can monitor ‘big picture’ issues such as time, depth, current etc. When things start to go off the rails, it is so easy to lose awareness of these things. This is why it is so important to have roles allocated before the dive to deal with potential problems. It will doubtless get confusing underwater so the more of an idea you can have of who will do what in various scenarios, the better prepared you’ll be when something goes wrong.

Debriefing: Where the Real Learning Occurs

Roles guarantee consistency during the dive. Debriefing guarantees improvement after the dive.

Post-Dive Questions for Team Reflection

• Did each role work as expected?
• Did anyone feel overloaded?
• Were roles clear or confusing?
• Did any “what if?” scenarios arise?
• If so, how did we handle them?
• What should we adjust for the next dive to make things better?

Learning comes from comparing the intention to the reality.

Debriefs help the team choose whether to rotate roles, change responsibilities, or redesign the plan entirely. 

Final Thoughts: Teamwork Is a Skill, Not an Assumption

Assigning roles in diving is not about hierarchy or control, it’s about clarity, shared expectations, and reducing cognitive load. Clear roles help recreational divers stay together, technical divers handle complexity, and instructors manage chaos while teaching safely.

Most importantly, roles improve team resilience. When problems happen – and they will – a team that has already discussed “who does what” will always perform better than a team that assumes everything will just work out.

Great teams aren’t lucky. They’re deliberate.

Mike Mason is part of the Human Diver Team. Our mission is to give you the skills and knowledge so that you can be better than you were yesterday. If you'd like to deepen your diving experience, check out the youtube channel and consider taking the online introduction course which will change your attitude towards diving and make it better and safer. Alternatively, visit the website or start your journey into Human Factors in Diving with this introduction blog .