The ideal team playerHow to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues

Authors	published	Link
Patrick M. Lencioni	2016	Find the book here

Summary

The book focusses on the so called "soft skill factor" when looking for new employees for a company.

The author makes the point that most HR interviews reduce that part to a very sorry state. Is that person "nice"? But that is of course not a good description and does not allow good interview results.

The book is split into two parts: the first part is a business novel that introduces the concept describing a construction company and their personel issues and how they create and use a model to find the right people. The second part is constructed more like a reference manual where you can read details about the model with explanations, as well as example questions for the interview.

The author identifies three different traits, that an employee should have:

• Hungry
  An employee should be eager to achieve things. He should not do a job "just for the money". The opposite would be a worker, that only does the minimal things to not get fired while focussing on his freetime activities and holidays.
  This behaviour enables that the team strives for results.
• Humble
  A team player is a person that knows his own worth and recognizes the value of the contribution of other team members, too. So he should not over- nor understate his own achievements and the achievements of others. He needs to be honest about who achieved what and he should be able to say "this was an achievement of the team" when it is true.
• Smart
  A smart person in the sense of the model is "people smart" which means that the person is able to communicate with other people to achieve things. The author often remembers us that this skill is not always "used for good". A person that is "people smart" can influence other people. When they do this only for their own benefit this is not something you would want in your team.

The author remembers us to not be too judgemental. Just because a person is less good in "people smart" it does not mean that he is not a team player. The model shall help us to focus our hiring process and help us finding the right coaching methods. A person that sometimes has a bad day or week or maybe even a month can not be simply put in the "not people smart"-box.
Also for most of these problems coaching methods exist that might bring the employee back to reasonable standards.

The author explicitly tells us in the second part not to forget to test competency as well by giving the applicants some work and to watch them performing. This can be done in different ways. It is important not to forget that the book is about "soft skills" and you want competency, too.