This week I final got to go through Patrick Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player as I’m preparing for a new course on Teams. I’ve enjoyed all of Lencioni’s books. I think this might be the only book I hadn’t read previously so I’m a big fan of how he takes a lot of important concepts and simplifies them.
As someone in the HR realm, this is one of his books that relates most closely to a lot of what I do or what I am involved with. The book tackles the question how do you assess if you have a the right people, team players. How do you recruit them? If you have people that lack some of the qualities how do you develop them and what do you do if you can’t?
The theory behind the book is that there are 3 main qualities that together make up the ideal team player: humility, hunger, and people smarts. These are simple qualities, but there really is a lot of power in looking at them in combination. One of the more helpful parts of the book was an analysis of what happens if one or two of these qualities is missing from someone. It’s a section that should resonate with anyone who has ever worked on teams. We all can relate to working with people who lack one or more of those qualities. We all probably can relate to the experience of being short in one of those areas ourselves in which development or growth was required.
Really recommend this one because it’s a road map for figuring out who are the people you want to surround yourselves with and what is worth cultivating and developing in those around you as well.
