One of the professional development training items on the books for FY18-19 at work was the book The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues by Patrick Lencioni.
This post gives a quick overview of what I learned, with more details to be found in this PDF.
Overview
The book is structured in two parts: a business fable, and the model for the ideal team player.
The fable describes how the main character, Jeff Shanley, switches careers to manage his uncle’s construction business. The company has employees with certain traits – some that help them work effectively, and others that make people quit. He works with his executive team to understand and ultimately define what makes an “ideal team player.”
The three virtues of an ideal team player:
- Humble – lacking excessive ego, emphasizing team over self
- Hungry – looking for more to do/learn, self-motivated, thinking about what’s next
- Smart – having common sense about people, perceptive about groups and individuals, listening
Next, the book describes what happens when one or more virtues are lacking. The conclusion contains advice for applying the virtues in four common workplace situations:
- Hiring
- Assessing current employees
- Developing employees who are lacking in one or more virtues
- Embedding the model into an organization’s culture
The concepts from the book are applicable both to employees and to managers/leaders (i.e., part of a team, or leading a team). If a leader isn’t humble, hungry, and smart, it’s not very likely the people working with him/her will aspire to those traits.
Commentary
There were three topics from the book that didn’t sit well with me that I’d like to mention here.
- The author recommends a group/panel interview for candidates. Other training I’ve received on how to conduct interviews recommended against group interviews. The interview process is stressful enough, so there’s little value in interrogating an individual in this setting. The less stress for the interviewee, the more likely you’ll be evaluating his/her baseline personality/behavior.
- For the hunger virtue, the author’s assessment approach (either for self or others) involves the question “I’m willing to contribute to and think about work outside of office hours.” At least in American culture, we value busyness and productivity. If you choose to work on things you enjoy outside of work, so be it; I think it’s unrealistic to hold everyone to this measure. As Dr. Brené Brown states in her lecture series The Power of Vulnerability, we would benefit from letting go of exhaustion as a status symbol and tying productivity to self-worth.
- Related to #2, this quotation from the book didn’t jibe with my thinking: “Plenty of people who lack hunger would like nothing more than to be fully engaged and more productive in their work.” I don’t understand why this is a shortcoming. In my ideal workplace (again, borrowing from Dr. Brown), my job would feed my family and my soul. Avoiding that mindset acknowledges our society’s definition of life as an unwinnable game: We’re never enough, never relevant enough; leading an ordinary life is synonymous with leading a meaningless life.