The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate Three Essential Virtues

Patrick Lencioni The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate Three Essential Virtues Jossey-Bass, 2016, $25 (hardcover), 219 pages"The ideal team player is humble, hungry, and smart."the ideal team player is a follow-up to Lencioni's previous book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, where he explained that real teamwork requires tangible, specific behaviors such as: vulnerability-based trust, healthy conflict, active commitment, peer-to-peer accountability, and a focus on results. This new book focuses on Lencioni's opinion of what team builders should be searching for in ideal team members. According to Lencioni, the three underlying virtues of ideal team players are: (1) humility, (2) hunger for success, and (3) people smarts. He asserts that leaders who identify, hire, and cultivate employees with these three virtues will have a significant advantage over those who do not. The purpose of the book is to help the reader understand how these three simple attributes can help managers build effective teams quickly and reduce costs associated with negative office politics, high rates of turnover, and workforce morale problems.Lencioni makes use of a story, which he calls a fable, to illustrate his key points. The story involves "Jeff" who leaves a CEO position at a Silicon Valley technology start-up to take a job with his Uncle Bob's construction company. Shortly after starting the job, Uncle Bob steps down due to health problems and puts Jeff in charge. As CEO, Jeff's biggest new challenge is quickly hiring 60 new employees to handle two huge new projects. In consultation with the other company executives, it was decided that hiring excellent team players is key. The big question is, how a manager identifies such candidates. What hiring and training processes assure the new employees will be good team players?Pages 192-193 contain 18 questions Lencioni uses to score applicants on the virtues of being humble, hungry, and smart. The humble employee will compliment and praise others, admit mistakes, and share credit for team accomplishments. The hungry employee will do more than is required, have a passion for the mission of the team, and look for opportunities to contribute outside of their area of responsibility. The smart employee is basically people smart as evidenced by understanding what others are feeling, showing empathy, demonstrating interest in the lives of teammates, and by being an attentive listener. Essentially the "smart" employee is someone with a high level of emotional intelligence.Lencioni is an excellent story teller and readers will find it hard to put down the book without finding the results of the drama. This 219 page book can easily be read in a few hours and the fable makes it easy to understand and apply the key concepts. The three virtues of being humble, hungry, and smart are undeniably important in building effective teams. …