The Ideal Team Player
“Great team players lack excessive ego or concerns about status. They are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to seek attention for their own. They share credit, emphasize team over self, and define success collectively rather than individually. It is no great surprise, then, that humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.”
“Leaders who can identify, hire, and cultivate employees who are humble, hungry, and smart will have a serious advantage over those who cannot.”
Why we like it:
As with his other books, I like Lencioni’s writing style which ties in a quick and easy-to-read fable that takes a touch of the dryness out of business concepts. I also like this book because I am a big fan of not overcomplicating everything we think about. Too many concepts and frameworks in business make things overburdened and cause them to lose value and eventually be abandoned. These ideas just make common sense and give a good framework for evaluating new employees, current employees, and even yourself. Keep it simple and just be HUNGRY, HUMBLE, and SMART!
Key Takeaways
The book does a great job in two ways to establish the framework. First, it defines the three traits of being humble, hungry, and smart. Second, it gives great advice on how to evaluate against the traits. In each of those areas, there are some good gotchas that are not initially apparent without reading Lencioni’s advice.
If you were to guess the definitions of two of the three traits you would likely be correct on Hungry and Humble. Smart, however, has an interesting twist. In this book, smart is not about the best education, or the highest IQ, or who has the most domain knowledge. Being smart, as defined by The Ideal Team Player, has more to do with a person’s awareness of their impact on others. Do you understand how your actions impact others? Do you understand how you are perceived? I liked this small epiphany, which I know should be common sense, but it does impact how I evaluate myself and others. We have all heard stories of the best athlete on a team being very cancerous and detrimental to team success.
In order to use the framework, Lencioni has great advice during the hiring process, doing self-evaluations, and evaluating teammates. A key takeaway for me in this area was the idea that people are not in one spot forever and even drift between different areas in day-to-day circumstances. Similar to Kim Scott’s view on how people move around the Radical Candor matrix people can also ebb and flow in how humble, hungry, and smart they are at given points in time. Furthermore, regardless of where you are with respect to one of the traits there is always room for improvement.
As with all of our book recommendations, we hope you don’t take this as a summary of the book and assume you have the info you need. We hope these show you a bit of how Crafted thinks and entices you to buy and read the actual book!
Thanks for reading!