Shaping a Winning Team: A Leader's Guide to Hiring, Assessing, and Developing the People You Need to Succeed

by Paul Fayad, Chak Fu Lam

Organizations cost themselves more than a quarter of their annual earnings with each bad hire. They rely on failed interview processes and fallible intuition of individual managers when they bring in staff, develop training programs, and promote from within. Despite good intentions, they set their people up for failure, while at the same time damaging morale and missing opportunities for higher-quality performance.

And yet we have the data to do better. Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam have decades of experience in the research and practice of human resources and management, and they share it in Shaping a Winning Team. This indispensable guide introduces you to the rowers, sitters, and drillers who you have on your team right now. The seeming simplicity of these labels belies the massive impact they have—good or bad—on your organizational success. The authors’ proprietary instruments, including the Positive Assessment Tool (PATsm), use science to help you attract the personality and behavioral traits that will determine your success as you elevate your rowers, shift your sitters, and shed the drillers.

Fayad and Lam provide leadership methods to help you accentuate the strengths of your people as you hire, assess, and manage your most important assets. Join them as you create an organizational culture that is lasting and positive—one that is built for the modern workplace to reduce turnover and increase productivity and quality.

232 pages, Hardcover

Published August 6, 2024

Reviews

[Lynn Corker · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wasn’t overly impressed with this book. I’ve been in HR for over 20 years and the information in this book really didn’t present anything new. Essentially, give the lead to the positive people, manage the negative people, and let the middle choose which side to follow. I didn’t learn any strategy for implementing this style, I heard a lot of research from other sources that are well known. I get like this was a different shade of lipstick and calling it a makeover.

[Victoria Gilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

What stayed with me most after reading Shaping a Winning Team is its insistence that building a great organization is far less about luck than about disciplined, evidence-based decision-making. Rather than relying on intuition or personality-driven management, Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam make a compelling case for treating hiring and talent development as measurable, repeatable processes that can transform an organization's performance.

What makes the book especially valuable is that it moves beyond simply identifying the problem of bad hiring. The authors offer practical frameworks that managers can immediately apply, including their concepts of "rowers," "sitters," and "drillers." These categories are memorable without feeling gimmicky because they give leaders a common language for discussing team dynamics, accountability, and organizational culture.

I also appreciated the balance between research and real-world application. The book doesn't overwhelm readers with theory, nor does it rely solely on anecdotes. Instead, it combines behavioral science, assessment strategies, and decades of management experience into guidance that feels equally useful for executives, HR professionals, entrepreneurs, and anyone responsible for building high-performing teams.

Perhaps most importantly, Shaping a Winning Team recognizes that leadership isn't simply about finding talented people—it's about creating an environment where the right people can thrive. In an era when employee engagement, retention, and workplace culture have become strategic priorities, this book offers a thoughtful, practical roadmap that feels both timely and highly actionable.

[Darya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall the book is interesting and provides insights on team members and their input in organization development and team performance. The referral goes to rowers, sitters and drillers as well as how to identify, deal with and manage them. For me the main point of management learnt from the book is around positivity in team's life and dealing with assignments. This is connected to PAY (positivity assessment tool) reviewed in the book. There are some good ideas on improving team dynamics and supporting positive growth and performance.

[Ngima Sherpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Explanation of Organizational Leadership approaches and insights of finding out successful candidates.

[Bill Cosentino · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read. But they spoke so much about assessments and didn’t actually give the assessments of even examples of questions on the assessments.