PDF Summary:The Ideal Team Player, by Patrick M. Lencioni

In our interdependent and ever-changing world, being a team player who can work effectively with others to achieve a group goal is more important than ever. However, true team players are surprisingly uncommon, in part because many organizations are unclear on what being a team player means. As a result, they often end up hiring people who undermine teamwork instead of strengthening it.

In The Ideal Team Player, Patrick Lencioni defines the model team player as a person with humility, hunger, and people skills. He explores how you can transform your organization by hiring with these virtues in mind, developing them in your current employees, and creating a culture that fosters a strong team dynamic. In our guide, we’ll explore Lencioni’s advice and look at how it compares to advice from other experts in business, leadership, and team management, including Geoff Smart, Yvon Chouinard, and Tony Hsieh.

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To assess people smarts, ask the candidate how they’d describe their personality. They should be introspective and their description should jibe with your observations. If the candidate has trouble answering the question, they might lack self-awareness. You can also look for a willingness to work constructively with others by asking what kinds of people annoy them, both at work and in their personal lives, and how they respond to them.

Lencioni notes that it’s hard to detect people smarts in an interview alone, so he recommends, if possible, incorporating a nontraditional step in the interview process: Take the candidate out of the office to see how they act in an unstructured environment. Observing a person’s behavior in different situations can be a better way to gauge interpersonal skills than asking questions—for instance, noticing how they deal with waiters, receptionists, and cashiers.

Arguments Against Screening for Personality

In Who, Smart doesn’t focus on the importance of ascertaining a candidate’s people skills. In fact, some of his advice contrasts with Lencioni’s regarding this topic: He warns against asking questions designed to judge a candidate’s personality and how they interact with the world, arguing that these attempts at reading a person’s psychological profile lack relevance and can’t predict performance.

For example, he notes that some interviewers ask unusual questions like, “If you could choose to be an animal, what kind would you pick and why?” Or, they’ll try to set up an unexpected challenge, like spilling something and seeing if the candidate helps clean it up. Smart calls these types of questions “gimmicks” and argues that they’re useless not only because they lack a scientific basis but also because candidates can game them. They can answer with witty responses, for example, that paint them in a positive light but don’t actually reflect who they are.

Smart also discourages unorthodox techniques such as taking a candidate out of the office to, for example, a party, to see how they interact with others, arguing that while this can reveal likeability, it can’t show whether a person is well suited for the job.

It’s worth noting, though, that Smart’s examples are not as focused or deliberate as Lencioni’s—Lencioni advises that you ask pointed questions to reveal relevant personality traits, not general questions that reveal superficial or irrelevant traits like likeability or humor. Smart’s example of bringing a candidate to a party illustrates this: Lencioni’s recommendations to see how a candidate interacts with waiters and cashiers is designed to reveal how they might treat people in “helper” roles, and it can reveal arrogance that might harm a team’s dynamic—insights that merely bringing a candidate to a party won’t reveal.

Compare Notes

Another technique Lencioni recommends is to discuss your interviews with your colleagues. In many companies, various managers interview candidates separately but don’t discuss what they learned until the interview process has ended. Instead, Lencioni advises that you debrief managers immediately after an interview on whether the candidate seemed humble, hungry, and smart. Then use the next interview to ask follow-up questions on issues raised in the first. For example, if the first two interviewers agree that the candidate is hungry and smart, the third interviewer should focus on assessing humility.

(Shortform note: Smart notes that one of the most common mistakes an organization makes when interviewing is that many people interview the candidate but don’t discuss their interviews with each other, and then everyone involved asks the same questions. Further, because the questions don’t build on earlier questions, they end up being superficial—touching on the same entry points to a discussion. A better approach, Smart writes, is to have managers coordinate their inquiries so they don’t waste time finding repeated information, and can instead ask follow-up questions, as Lencioni also recommends.)

Repeat Questions

Lencioni also recommends that you ask questions more than once. The first time you ask a question, you often get a generic answer. If you ask again in a different way, you may get more details or a different answer. If you ask a third time, but you’re more pointed, you may get the most honest response.

(Shortform note: Smart offers a specific tip for repeating questions if you feel the candidate isn’t answering fully or honestly—reframe your question each time you ask. For example, if you ask them to tell you about struggles they had in a previous job, and they suggest everything was always wonderful, follow up with specifics like, “Tell me about a time something went wrong,” “What’s something you would have done differently,” “Describe a part of the job you didn’t like,” or “What were some ways your peers were stronger than you?” Eventually they’ll reveal what they were initially reluctant to disclose.)

Ask Them What Others Would Say

Ask candidates what others would say about them—for instance, instead of asking someone if he considers himself a hard worker, ask how colleagues would describe his work ethic or how he gets along with his coworkers. Candidates tend to give more honest answers to questions framed this way, perhaps because they think you might ask their colleagues the same question and compare answers.

(Shortform note: Smart recommends a similar technique, advising that you ask candidates how their previous five managers would rate them when you speak to them for a reference. He emphasizes that you frame it as “when” you speak with their previous managers, not “if,” because if your candidate believes you truly intend to speak with former employers, they’ll be more honest—they won’t want to give a rating that will differ substantially from what those employers are likely to say.)

Be Clear About Your Commitment

At the end of the interview process, tell candidates that you’re looking only for people who are humble, hungry, and smart. Stress that if a candidate lacking one of these critical qualities is hired, they’ll be miserable working for you if they don’t change. However, if they’re an ideal team player, they’ll love the job and the company’s culture. People often try to gloss over their weaknesses in an interview, but they may be less likely to do so if you stress that your company holds people accountable.

(Shortform note: Smart also advises that you be unquestionably clear with candidates about the commitment you expect from them. Instead of focusing on the personality skills of the candidate, though, Smart recommends that you emphasize the needs of the role, advising that you ensure your candidate understands the job’s mission, expectations, and skills that are needed for the role’s challenges. He writes that it’s critical that you’re explicit and transparent about each of these aspects, or you may hire a person who doesn’t fully understand your expectations and won’t succeed in the role.)

Assess Current Employees

Hiring team members is a good way to add to your team, but Lencioni notes that it’s rare for a leader to create an entire team from scratch. Therefore, you also must assess your existing employees for team qualities so you can spot which of them have potential to make great contributions, which may benefit from guidance (and how to focus that guidance), and which are unlikely to ever develop into team players and thus should be let go.

He writes that people who have none of the three virtues aren’t likely to ever develop into team players. You’re unlikely to find people like this on your team, however, because these types are easy to spot and are rarely hired because they stand out as people no one wants to work with.

You’re more likely to find that your team members have either one or two of the three qualities. Someone who has just one of them will have a tough time developing the other two, but it’s possible. People with two of the three virtues have a good chance of becoming ideal team players.

Balancing Team-Wide Strengths With Variety

Some management experts offer slightly different advice than Lencioni’s regarding how to assess employees; they caution that it’s important to have a variety of strengths on your team and suggest that pushing for all employees to have all virtues might result in a homogenic, inflexible group. Further, it’s important not to confuse personality traits with skill strengths. Skills can differ from person to person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean different people have more or less underlying positive personality characteristics. If you keep this in mind, you can more easily assemble a group that all has strong underlying personality traits even if their functioning skills are different.

For example, one person might be good at strategic thinking (often associated with hunger) while another might be good at influencing others (indicating people skills). This doesn’t mean the second person lacks hunger, nor that the first lacks people skills—it only means they have slightly stronger working skills in those areas.

This nuance underpins the arguments of leadership consultants Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, who, in Strengths Based Leadership, write that leaders shouldn’t aim to have everyone on their team display equal amounts of all strengths. Instead, look for people who are strong in various, differing areas and ensure that overall, your team as a whole is well-rounded. They write that you’re more likely to build a high-performance team by maximizing everyone’s various strengths rather than by asking them to improve their weaknesses, as it’s harder for people to improve areas they don’t have natural talents in.

Develop Employees’ Teamwork Qualities

For employees to improve, leaders must consistently point out when they’re not doing what’s needed. Lencioni acknowledges that it’s uncomfortable to repeatedly tell employees they’re missing the mark, but maintains that it’s the only way to get results. Those employees will either succeed or decide to leave—or you’ll have to terminate them.

Lencioni recommends some techniques to help people develop the team player virtues:

Humility: Some employees can improve if they simply start acting differently, practicing the behaviors they need to develop. For instance, they can push themselves to compliment someone or admit a mistake. Have teammates encourage the employee by highlighting the positive behaviors—for instance, a coworker might say, “I appreciated your compliment the other day…”

Hunger: Everyone, but especially unmotivated people, should have performance goals. But beyond telling someone to meet certain production goals, managers should set behavioral expectations. Tell unmotivated employees that they also need to help colleagues or the team meet their goals. This may include taking on additional responsibilities or working more hours. With specific goals, the employee will either step up or find another job.

People skills: Those who lack interpersonal skills aren’t usually intentionally being difficult or trying to cause problems. They just don’t pick up on how their words and actions affect others. When they do the wrong thing, immediately call attention to it. For example, you might say, “Your email really upset your coworkers. Before you send an email next time, you might want to have someone look over it and help you reword it.”

Feedback Is the Key to Improvement

Feedback is a critical aspect of Lencioni’s recommendations on how to improve behavior. Three aspects of feedback underpin his advice:

• He encourages positive feedback in response to good behavior (for example, having teammates let the person know they appreciated their compliments).

• He encourages negative feedback in response to poor behavior (like calling attention to a rude email).

• He recommends establishing a system through which a person will either meet or miss specific expectations (for example, performance goals).

The first two aspects will give your employee feedback from other people, but the third will give them feedback from real-world conditions. This can be more helpful, as it’s objective—when a person either hits or misses certain metrics, they’ll learn in a straightforwardly measurable way whether or not their efforts are effective.

In Think Like a Freak, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner write that this type of feedback is the key to learning: People can’t know if something they’re trying out is successful unless they see it in action to determine whether their ideas actually work in the real world. They write that this is how people have learned anything throughout history. For example, as people learned to build bridges, it was only through testing that they’d learn if the designs they thought of could hold up to real-world conditions.

In this way, Lencioni’s advice for developing your employees can be seen as an experiment: To determine if employees are a good fit for your organization, test them to see if they can respond appropriately to the parameters you establish. The feedback they receive during the experiment can help them develop the right skills, and the feedback you receive—seeing whether they adjust their behavior or not—can reveal if they’ll succeed as part of your group.

Build a Culture of Teamwork

Lencioni writes that to build lasting success, you must embed the values of humility, hunger, and people smarts in your company’s culture. To do this, talk about teamwork constantly, reward people for teamwork, and address violations appropriately.

(Shortform note: In Delivering Happiness, Tony Hsieh, former CEO of online retailer Zappos, writes that having a healthy culture in your organization is critical to success. Like Lencioni, he recommends formalizing a set of principles that will underpin your culture, and though he doesn’t name the exact three virtues Lencioni does, his recommendations imply the same themes. He writes that you should choose principles that align with your organization’s mission and purpose—for example, you might focus on embracing change, taking personal responsibility, and prioritizing customer experience. Each of these corresponds to humility, hunger, and people skills.)

Talk about Teamwork Constantly

Leaders who believe in teamwork should talk about their commitment to the three virtues to everyone—customers, partners, vendors, and job candidates. That helps establish the expectation among people dealing with the company that employees will be humble, hungry, and smart and encourages employees to behave that way. And as word gets around, the organization becomes known for its culture, and it’s easier to find employees who are a good fit.

While it may sound simplistic or contrived to some, the organizations that are most explicit about a teamwork culture are the most successful in building it.

(Shortform note: In Let My People Go Surfing, Yvon Chouinard, founder of clothing store Patagonia, writes that publicizing his company’s core values has been instrumental to its success. Because he talks about his mission openly, customers are happy to support his company, giving him a competitive edge in the marketplace. He also attracts better job candidates because only people who share the same values seek out employment with him. This approach not only brings him workers who’ll give him their best effort, it also lowers his company’s turnover rate, because when employees are a good fit from the start, they stay longer.)

Reward People for Teamwork

Managers often don’t point out when employees do the right thing because they assume the positive behavior is typical for them, and that it doesn’t need to be remarked upon. However, Lencioni argues that by staying silent, they’re missing an opportunity. When employees act in ways that show humility, hunger, or people skills, leaders should call attention to it. When you praise an employee for their positive actions, it rewards and motivates the employee, and it reminds everyone else of what’s expected.

(Shortform note: Praise doesn’t just teach employees what behaviors they should emulate, it also broadcasts a positive emotional energy that can energize a workplace. In You Win in the Locker Room First, leadership expert Jon Gordon and former NFL coach Mike Smith write that this happens because emotional states are contagious. The emotional states of a team’s leaders are particularly contagious—people readily mimic the character traits of those in authority positions. Thus, when managers dole out praise, lower-level employees are often inspired to follow suit, resulting in an overall encouraging workplace.)

Address Violations

When you see behavior that goes against one of the values, whether the misstep is major or minor, let the violator know. Employees are often unaware of small slip-ups and learn the most from them when a manager or team leader points them out. Be tactful when addressing these offenses, and don’t punish them too harshly, but it’s OK to point them out each time they come up—Lencioni writes that great teams should be intolerant of behavior that lacks any of the three virtues.

(Shortform note: Though Lencioni advises that you point out any instance of behavior that falls short of the ideal virtues, many psychologists argue that there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and constant criticism that can create a toxic workplace. The danger of being intolerant of any poor behavior is that it can lead to constant fault-finding, which can cause people to behave even more poorly or to make more mistakes because they’re on edge and stressed. If criticism, no matter how constructive, is too frequent, it can lead others to focus more on how their manager sees them rather than on their work itself, and it can harm a team dynamic rather than strengthen it.)

Put the Virtues Into Practice

Lencioni devotes the last part of his book to a discussion of how the three teamwork virtues correspond to the ideas in his previous book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The Ideal Team Player is about the qualities of individual team members, while The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is about team dynamics.

(Shortform note: Read our summary of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team here.)

Lencioni writes that the five biggest problems teams need to overcome to work effectively are:

• Mistrust: Teams can’t build trust when the members fear being vulnerable with each other.
• Fear of conflict: A team’s desire for harmony prevents productive conflict.
• Lack of commitment: The fear of being wrong prevents good decisions.
• Avoidance: Wanting to avoid discomfort prevents team members from holding each other accountable.
• Ignoring results: A desire for credit shifts the focus away from team results.

Lencioni argues that these problems are less likely to arise and are easier to overcome when team members are humble, hungry, and smart about dealing with people. For example, a person with strong people skills will be better at engaging in healthy conflict.

Psychological Safety in the Workplace

Each of the five problems Lencioni identifies stems from a need for psychological safety. This is a psychological state people enter when they feel safe within their workplace to take interpersonal risks such as seeking help, admitting mistakes, asking questions, or challenging ideas. In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle writes that an effective, productive, healthy team starts with this feeling of safety, which makes team members feel valued, supported, and understood.

In a safe environment, employees:

• Trust each other not to betray their interests

• Are open to constructive disagreement (conflict) with coworkers and managers

• Are willing to take risks on projects even if they may fail

• Take initiative to solve problems even if it makes others uncomfortable

• Don’t get caught up trying to steal credit or accolades

Coyle writes that you can cultivate psychological safety by using belonging cues, which are behaviors that make people feel comfortable in three aspects: connection (support from others in the group), future (a forward path or upward mobility in the organization), and security (permission to speak up without fear of retribution). These aspects align with Lencioni’s three virtues—not in a one-to-one measure, but instead, they overlap to empower people to develop their people skills, satisfy their hunger, and foster humility:

• Your people skills are encouraged not only by feeling connection to others but also by feeling the security of being allowed to speak honestly.

• Your hunger is developed by your belief in your future with the organization, as well as your ability to speak up to advance your ideas.

• Your humility is fostered by the intersection of all three cues, as taken together, they discourage feelings of insecurity that often lead to self-preservation (resulting in self-centered behavior).