The Ideal Team Player
Patrick Lencioni · 2016
The Ideal Team Player (2016) is a book by Patrick Lencioni on Leadership & management. A business fable about a construction firm hiring fast without wrecking its culture, followed by a practical model: Lencioni argues that great team players share three simple, identifiable virtues, humble, hungry, and people-smart.
A deceptively simple lens, humble, hungry, and people-smart, that turns "good team player" from a vague compliment into three traits you can actually interview for, coach, and fire for.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The Ideal Team Player pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- The ideal team player is defined by three virtues working together. Humble, Hungry, and Smart (people-smart). It is the combination, not any single trait, that makes someone easy and productive to work with; missing even one changes everything.
- Humble is the single most important and indispensable virtue. Great team players share credit, define success collectively, and lack excessive concern for status. Its absence, ego, is the greatest single barrier to real teamwork.
The other 5 — and the full 10-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 10 minutes, read or listened to.
- A Fable at Valley Builders: When Teamwork Suddenly Gets Expensive
- Three Virtues Hiding in Plain Sight: Humble, Hungry, Smart
- Humble: The Indispensable Virtue and Its Two Faces
- Hungry: The Self-Motivated Engine
- Smart: People-Smart, Not Book-Smart
- The Combinations: Pawn, Bulldozer, Charmer, and the Dangerous Middle
- Hiring for the Three Virtues
- Assessing, Developing, and Embedding the Model
Finish The Ideal Team Player tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 10 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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