Book Review: The Ideal Team Player

Posted by Kristin Arnold on August 24, 2021

The Ideal Team Player

Get the right people on the bus!
I just got certified to deliver Patrick Lencioni’s The Six Types of Working Geniuses and had to re-read his book, The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues.

Why?  Using Jim Collins’ “bus” analogy, the Ideal Team Player provides a framework to get the right people on the bus.  The Six Types of Working Geniuses get those right people on the right seats in the bus, and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team get those right people in the right seats to get the bus to go!

So I dusted off the Ideal Team Player (it was written in 2016) and the leadership fable is just as applicable today.  A new CEO to an established construction company is facing explosive growth and a weak team to execute on it.  How does he and his leadership team turn the company around?  By discovering and focusing on three “virtues” – humble, hungry, and people smart.

The second half of the book provides easy-to-use tools to “bake” these virtues into the hiring, assessing of current employees, developing employees who are lacking in one or more of the virtues and embedding the model into an organization’s culture.

There is a self-assessment on pages 192-3 that was very eye-opening and worth taking because we can ALL be better team players!

KRISTIN ARNOLD, MBA, CPF | Master, CSP is a high-stakes meeting facilitator and professional panel moderator.  She’s been facilitating teams of executives and managers in making better decisions and achieving greater results for over 27 years.  She is the author of the award-winning book, Boring to Bravo: Proven Presentation Techniques to Engage, Involve and Inspire Audiences to Action.  Her latest book, 123 Ways to Add Pizazz to a Panel Discussion was published in January 2021.

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KRISTIN ARNOLD, MBA, CSP, CPF|Master has been facilitating meaningful conversations between executives and managers to make better decisions and achieve extraordinary results for 25+ years. She's a leading authority on moderating panel discussions and passionate about finding the perfect olive to complement a vodka martini.

 
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