Book Review: The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues

The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues, Patrick Lencioni (Hoboken, New Jersey: Jossey-Bass, 2016)

Eric Spivey, Reviewer

There are those moments in ministry when God’s grace provides clarity to understand difficult past experiences. This happened one morning listening to a leadership simulcast dedicated to Work as Worship. Preachers and business leaders told stories and principals that guided their work. Then, quite unexpectedly business consultant Patrick Lencioni spoke on the three essential virtues of the ideal team player.

Immediately, all the staff challenges of my years as a Senior Pastor came rushing back to me. One by one, I saw my own blindness in hiring and the origins of most of our challenges. Lencioni’s talk made such an impression, I immediately ordered his book The Ideal Team Player to develop these three virtues into my ministry of staff supervision.

Lencioni’s book is a continuation of his previous book The Five Disfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable (2002). In both books, he uses an engaging leadership fable to tell the story of a CEO’s work in hiring and guiding a leadership team. Lencioni uses the second half of each book to describe his leadership model presented in the fable. The Ideal Team Player’s fable continues the story presented in his earlier book focusing on 3 individual virtues needed to be an ideal team member.

These three essential virtues are simple and profound. For me, they have given me a new framework to consider new hires and to evaluate present staff members. To the person, when I recognize an exceptional member of my staff team, I discover he or she possesses all three of these virtues.

First, an ideal team player is humble. Lencioni says, “humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of a team player.” It allows team members to place the ministry of the whole church over their individual ministries. When team members can let go of their egos in order to share credit with the whole team, the church wins and staff trust grows.

Second, an ideal team player is hungry. Lencioni says, “hungry people are always looking for more. More to do, more to learn.” Hungry staff members are self-motivated, stay focused on their work, and push me to get better. I agree with Lencioni, when a staff member lacks hunger, it is the hardest virtue to coach them to learn.

Finally, an ideal team player is smart. Lencioni says, being smart refers to “a person’s common sense about people.” Smart people have good judgement and intuition about people. Smart ministers know the tasks of their ministry AND how to function well within the community of people known as the church. They can engage and work with people.

Humble. Hungry. Smart. These are the three most important characteristics I look for as I hire and evaluate staff. Their importance has changed the way I ask questions in interviews and when I call references. When a person possesses these three virtues there is much we can do together for the sake of God’s Kingdom.