The Ideal Team Player

Lencioni details how he developed the principles that inform most of the book in a subchapter in the “The Model’’ section of the book called “The History of the Model.” In 1997, Lencioni and others cofounded a company called The Table Group, a consulting firm that helped companies develop leadership skills and a better team dynamic. Initially, the colleagues rather easily decided on the three core values. According to Lencioni, “We had an easy time agreeing on our core values: humble, hungry, and smart. These were the principles that guided our department previously, and we wanted to maintain them in our new firm” (162). As is demonstrated in the book, the new firm placed a heavy premium on hiring employees who exhibited these values.

Based on their experiences, the firm soon learned that many companies were genuinely interested in developing better teamwork among their employees. However, Lencioni and his firm also noticed that many companies were simply interested in finding a catchy slogan. He says, “[W]hen we explained humble, hungry, and smart, something strange would often happen: clients would declare that they were going to adopt those values, too” (162-63). Lencioni speculates that the reason these words were of such high value to such companies was because the slogan offered them a quick approach to a complicated matter. He says, “We often attributed our clients’ interest in our values to expediency, or perhaps even laziness—their desire to grab the first set of positive-sounding words, so that they could declare their search for values over” (163). Eventually, Lencioni and his colleagues realized that they were perhaps mistaken about this speculation and “that there was a logical explanation why [their] clients wanted to adopt humble, hungry, and smart” (163).

Lencioni and his colleagues, as part of their leadership instruction, had made Lencioni’s first book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a core text. The companies were familiar with the principles of the book and how to identify employees who exhibited these dysfunctional behaviors. The converse of this, behaviors that constitute an effective team player, were then juxtaposed with the following question: “Could a person fully practice the five behaviors at the heart of teamwork […] if he or she didn’t buy into the idea of being humble, hungry, and smart?” (163-64). They discovered the answer to be a resounding “no.” This further solidified their belief in the three core values of being an ideal team player. Lencioni also maintains an important distinction: “Those words weren’t necessarily core values, but they were critical hiring and development criteria for any organization that wanted teamwork to be central to its operations” (163). “The Fable” section of the book emphasizes the importance of embedding these values into a company’s culture so that when screening new employees through the three-values filter, the cultural values naturally draw in the kinds of people likely to exhibit the behaviors conducive to being a good team player.