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September 14 - September 18, 2017
the three underlying virtues that enable them to be ideal team players: they are humble, hungry, and smart.
Leaders who can identify, hire, and cultivate employees who are humble, hungry, and smart will have a serious advantage over those who cannot.
“Team players have three things in common. They are humble, hungry, and smart.”
After considering the question for a moment, she responded. “The thing is, people who aren't socially smart probably aren't very good at knowing it. Otherwise, they'd be better at it.”
“Stop making the perfect enemy of the good.”
Great team players lack excessive ego or concerns about status. They are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to seek attention for their own. They share credit, emphasize team over self, and define success collectively rather than individually. It is no great surprise, then, that humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.
Humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.
“Humility isn't thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”
Hungry people are always looking for more. More things to do. More to learn. More responsibility to take on. Hungry people almost never have to be pushed by a manager to work harder because they are self-motivated and diligent. They are constantly thinking about the next step and the next opportunity. And they loathe the idea that they might be perceived as slackers. Hungry people almost never have to be pushed by a manager to work harder because they are self-motivated and diligent.
In the context of a team, smart simply refers to a person's common sense about people.
Smart people just have good judgment and intuition around the subtleties of group dynamics and the impact of their words and actions.
Smart simply refers to a person's common sense about people.
Many people will try to get a job even if they don't fit the company's stated values, but very few will do so if they know that they're going to be held accountable, day in and day out, for behavior that violates the values.
The most important part of the development process, and the part that is so often missing, is the leader's commitment to constantly “reminding” an employee if she is not yet doing what is needed. Without this, improvement will not occur.
Hunger is the least sensitive and nuanced of the three virtues. That's the good news. The bad news is, based on my experience, it's the hardest to change.
The key is to find out which people who lack hunger really like being that way and which don't, and then to support the ones who want to change, and to lovingly help the others find a job that doesn't require hunger.
I've found that, in most cases, managers greatly underestimate the impact that a comment or quick gesture of approval has on employees. They'll spend weeks trying to tweak an annual bonus program or some other compensation system, believing that their employees are coin-operated, but they'll neglect to stop someone during a meeting and say, “Hey, that's a fantastic example of hunger. We should all try to be more like that.”
