Patrick Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player is a Must-Read
I spent some time with Patrick Lencioni’s newest book this week. Like every one of Lencioni’s books, The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues is a great read. Like virtually all of his books (with the exception of The Advantage), The Idea Team Player is part fable (a very compelling and imaginative story about a businessman) and part model and practice (and very transferable).
Having heard him at this year’s Global Leadership Summit I knew I needed to dig deeper into the ideas he presented there (Virtually everything he talked about felt like indispensable information and tools we needed to know about). At the essence of The Idea Team Player is a “powerful framework that will help you identify, hire and develop ideal team players in any kind of organization.”
Trust me….this has real application for much of what we do (both from a paid staff hiring standpoint and also from a volunteer recruiting standpoint).
While the fable portion of The Ideal Team Player is a page-turner and a very easy read, it also contains many insights that will prompt you to highlight, star or dog-ear pages. The fable also makes thinking about the model or framework presented in the second part of the book very understandable (and as a result, applicable).
The “model” section of the book includes several key components. First, Lencioni spends a few pages carefully defining the three essential virtues of the idea team player (humble, hungry, and people smart). A quick review of these virtues will help you more easily grasp the model.
Second, the model section offers a drawing, a visual way of seeing how the three essential virtues interconnect to produce ideal team players. With the visual, you’ll also come away with a helpful framework to think about the potential damage caused by a player with only one or two of the virtues.
Finally, Lencioni hits a home run in the application section of the model. Far beyond simply developing eyes to see the model clearly, the application section will be a toolbox all of will want to have at our disposal. Clearly not an afterthought, these applications will definitely end up being used by many.
The four applications presented are:
- Hiring
- Assessing current employees
- Developing employees who lack one or more of the virtues
- Embedding the model in an organization’s culture
If you do any hiring or recruiting, The Ideal Team Player is a must-read. I have no doubt this framework will quickly make it into our set of hiring and recruiting practices.
