The Ideal Team Player

Missio Nexus’ leadership thoughtfully summarize books, giving you the Leader’s Edge to help inform, stimulate and provoke profitable discussion.

Leader’s Edge (Leadership)

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

Patrick M. Lencioni. Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2016.

240 pages
ISBN: 978-1119209591
ASIN: B01B6AEJJ0

Summary

This book, like most of Lencioni’s books, is written in two parts, the first being a business parable and the second is the unpacking of the ideas in the story. The ideal team player is described as somebody who is smart, humble and hungry. The parable is predictable but does a great job of illustrating how staffing can be improved using this simple grid. The unpacking of the parable contains excellent advice on how hiring and review processes can be adapted to find these sort of people. It also shows how the three attributes of an ideal team player fit with Lencioni’s overall framework, particularly the Five Dysfunctions of a Team and how to coach people toward these attributes. There is a chapter which breaks down the types of people that have one, two or all three of the ideal attributes.