The Ideal Team Player

I'm not going to say much about the "fable" format - a lot of these reviews seem not to be familiar with this particular style of book, and a reacting negatively to that. Yes, 75% of this book is a work of fiction with characters and dialogue that serve as a way for the author to convey his ideas in the format of a story, and yes as with The Phoenix Project and other similar Business Novels, the quality of this fiction is fairly hit or miss and it's mostly lots of straw men that a perfect examples of the principles the book wants to get across. If this format sounds like it would bother you, you won't like this book.

Now, as to the actual content - I think it's quite good. It's a deeper dive into the concepts of "The No Asshole Rule" which is basically to suggest that making "cultural fit" an important part of your hiring process is a good idea. Not just to implicitly avoid hiring assholes (this book is fond - very fond - of the word "jackass") but to make the fact that you're doing so very deliberate and well-known within your organization, as well as telling clients and partners so they should know to give you feedback if they wind up working with an asshole in your organization, and to tell prospective candidates as well so that they know that if they are an asshole, they'd be miserable in your organization and drop out. This is all really solid advice, and I think it's a good idea.

One needs to be careful about hiring for "cultural fit" in general, it's an easy mechanism to hurt diversity and inclusion, often it becomes a shorthand for "hire people like me" which leads to uniformity in workforce. That's why I think it was great for the book to, more than similar books, spell out exactly what makes someone a "jackass" and how to look for them while hiring as well as look for them in your organization to either help them improve or remove them. So much comes down to spelling out expectations for your candidates and employees; simply making it clear that you actually expect people to interact with each other in a respectful and compassionate way rather than just hoping people do (and making it clear that, if you don't, you're gone) goes a long way.

To get specific, Patrick Lencioni enumerates 3 primary positive traits to look for in candidates. He suggest they be:

1. Humble
2. Hungry
3. Smart

"Humble" can refer to more than thinking little of yourself - it means not thinking of yourself that much at all. Undervaluing your own contributions isn't humility, it's low self-confidence. The book spells this out a bit, and I think it's great advice, nothing to disagree with about looking for your employees to be Humble.

"Smart" refers to being socially smart, and I think the book's use of simply "Smart" to have a one-word trait is lamentable. "Socially Smart" is much clearer, and more inline with what the book is going for - this is the primary "Jackass" quality that keeps being referenced. Basically just, be polite to people, disagree in a respectful way, don't be hard to work with. As someone in the software industry, I see far, far, far, far, far too many organizations that are tolerant of behavior that's not socially smart simply because the perpetrators are other kinds of smart. Delicate Geniuses who are too important to fire, and are then empowered to act like raging assholes in both subtle and overt ways with no repercussion. I find this to be one of my industry's greatest failings, and I want everyone to read this book simply to give them a chance to understand how important it is you weed out people who aren't socially smart as early as possible, and help your current employees lacking in this area become more socially smart (or fire them if they can't hack it).

"Hungry" is my biggest sticking point with this book. As the author talked about looking for Hunger, I became worried this could be easily reduced to looking for people to work after hours or on weekends. Sadly, my concerns came to pass as working outside of 9-5 hours did indeed become a good way to figure out and evaluate who is and isn't hungry. In fact the author even argues that a candidate who asks a lot of questions about working hours in the interview is likely not a Hungry person, and may be avoided. I find this to be a completely terrible idea - I think work/life balance is extremely important to prevent burnout, and it's not hard to value passion in one's work while still balancing hobbies, family, and personal life. The fact that I say this, as far as I can tell, would exclude me from Lencioni's hiring processes. I do ask about work/life balance in interviews, I find many companies in my industry have a terrible attitude toward balance and I like to sniff them out when I interview somewhere. Lencioni even makes a point that someone who is passionate about their hobbies is likely to be less passionate about their work, and may not be an ideal team player. I just find all of this reasoning to be very dangerous, and while I appreciate the sentiment of wanting to find people who are passionate/hungry, the specific advice given in the book to find those people I think is pretty bad.

Overall I liked the book enough to overlook its shortcomings. Even as I disagree with the author's suggestions for sussing out a full 1/3rd of the ideal team player traits, and even as I cringe at the out-of-place preaching for Jesus (yes it's in there), I still find the rest of the contents of the book super valuable and would recommend reading it.