EntreLeadership - #155: Patrick Lencioni—The Ideal Team Player

Episode Date: July 11, 2016

What are the top virtues of a great team player? Best-selling author Patrick Lencioni joins us to talk about the three qualities that every awesome team member exhibits and how to identify, hire, and develop ideal team players in any kind of organization. If you are a small-business owner who’s hiring, a leader, or just a someday-in-the-future entrepreneur, this is the episode for you. entreleadership.com/podcast A 90-day Plan to Jumpstart New-employee Performance Infusionsoft's Free SEO Guide Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now here is your host, Ken Coleman. Broadcasting from the Music City, this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. We're going to get to some listener email. We've got Pat Linscioni, our feature conversation around his new book, The Ideal Team Player. Of course, our Entree Leadership Tool, a 90-day plan to jump start.

new employee performance and InfusionSoft has a brand new tool this July. It is SEO basics for small business. That's search engine optimization. This is one of those valuable things that you can possibly make use of search engine optimization for the small business. So Chad Kirby from InfusionSoft will stop by and tell you about that. So it's going to be great fun. Really excited about all the emails we're getting.

This is a lot of fun. So let's get right to it. Ken's Electronic Mail. Got an email from Connor James, who's been listening to the podcast for just four to five months. Love the new listener who comes in from different spaces and says, oh, wow, what's happening here? And by the way, I love the old listeners as well. Got to make sure we say that. But this is interesting.

He sent an email, and he said, been listening for four to five months, and it's transforming my approach as I prepared to launch a business. This is very exciting. So we got a nuby entrepreneur who's emailing us. He said, recently I went back and listened to the best of 2015 podcast. I'd already heard the Gary V interview, but was so glad to be reminded of his advice on getting honest feedback from our closest family members or friends. So he goes on to say that he sits down with his brother. And his brother basically says, you need to trust your gut more.

You're going to succeed. But one of your weaknesses is you overthink things. So Connor not only hears the feedback, and this is the great takeaway that Gary was challenging you folks with. He didn't just hear it. He trusted it. He soaked on it. He then believed it, and now he's acting on it. So his final thought was hearing that feedback was so huge because I had not been aware of it. Why in the world is it taking me 10 days to decide on a small decision? I'm overthinking in all caps. So thank you so much, Connor, for listening. Thanks for the email. I'm going to thank Gary V for continuing to help our listeners. Hey, you can email us,

and we'd love to hear from you. Podcast at Entreeleadership.com. Podcast at Entreeleadership.com. Well, folks, our feature interviews with Pat Lynchione, and I'm going to say this unequivocally. The guy's one of my favorite interviews. I say this over and over and over again, and I really, really mean it. I find the guy to be so amazing at distilling, complex, into the simple in a short amount of time. Pat and I are both sports fans. You'll hear that come out in the conversation. And I was thinking as I got in the studio today to prepare for this podcast how much I love the title of the book and the book itself The Ideal Team Player because if you're into leadership if you're into winning teams period Well then this topic certainly is of interest to you and so I was thinking about it Eric the producer and I was thinking of

What are some of the greatest teams of all time? Because if you think of a book called the ideal team You can't help but think of the ideal team An ideal team is obviously made up of a lot of ideal team players. Now, I'm a big sports nut, but I want you just for a moment, especially those of you who are leading teams. What are some of the great teams that you admired? Why were they great teams? I think it's a good exercise just to write some of the attributes down, or maybe one attribute that stands out among all the others of great teams.

For me, just give you an example, I think about what's one of the greatest teams of all time? For me, it's certainly the very first dream team. Here we are in July. In August, the Summer Olympics happened again in Rio, and you think back to the very first time that we as a country decided, okay, we're going to let professionals play in the Olympics. And so we did. And so it was a big deal because our college teams were getting beaten by the other countries. And we can't have that as Americans.

We've got to be number one, which I love. No shame in our game. And so we pulled together the goal. greatest basketball team of all times called the dream team there's a documentary on it on this podcast we had the assistant coach brendon sir on this podcast telling you folks stories about the first couple team meetings things of that nature by chuck daly who was the head coach here's the deal i thought back had i asked eric i said do you remember the dream team he said i had a poster i said oh great well how old were you in 1992. He was two.

After I shook off my despair and just the idea that I could possibly be that much older than my producer, I got back on and I started thinking, here's the deal I wanted to share with you people. Great teams, right? What are the big attributes? That team, if I had to pick one attribute

among all other attributes that that team had, it was unity. Because think about it. I mean, this is Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird. The three biggest names in basketball at that time and certainly top 10 all-time players. These guys are A-lister's, legends, and they decided to come together.

Charles Barkley was on that team. Carl Malone. I mean, you can just go down the list. Patrick Ewing, David Robinson, all these guys, A-list stars. And they decided to come together. And if you remember watching some of those games, they were passing a ball around like the Harlem Globetrotters. They were so good.

Yet they could have won by 10 points, but they were winning by 40 and 50 points. because they cared about the flag, they cared about the gold medal, and there was one clear goal. And Chuck Daly, he managed that ego cesspool, if you will, so beautifully. But it was because they were ideal team players. They decided, hey, you know what? This isn't about individual stats. We've got to bring the gold medal back home where it belongs.

It was one of the great, great demonstrations of unity that we've ever seen, certainly among egos and stars. So that, to me, is an ideal team example. But I think it's a good exercise for you as leaders as you think about this conversation and getting ideal team players on your team. Do you be thinking about, hey, what does an ideal team look like? Because there's so much transferable truth here. All right, we're going to get right to my conversation with Pat.

And remember, when we come out of the conversation, I've got a very special offer for just you podcast lists. So stay tuned for that. Here is my conversation with Pat Lanchione. Well, Pat, it's always great to have you on the podcast. and we were just together in Dallas for the Entree Summit. That was a great time. I must tell you that the panel we did where I essentially just sat there and watched you and Dave Ramsey and Jim Collins take a beach ball of a topic and play with it. It was really fun.

Is that great energy for you? Is that something that you don't do so much? And how fun was that? Yeah. It definitely didn't feel like work at all. And I think that what was fun is seeing Jim Collins particularly because he doesn't get to do that a lot. That's right. And so watching him enjoy dating.

in me and you, it was really fun. So it was a good time for me. I could do a little bit of that every day. I wish I had more time to do it. Yeah. I always love having a conversation with you. It's no longer an interview. And I was thinking this morning that I've interviewed you so many times now. I know it's well over 10 times. And one of the things I have not done recently, and I want to start our conversation about the latest book, the ideal team player this way. It's always a parable and then you teach out of the parable. But I have gotten away from asking you to just set up the key players in this parable. Then we'll start diving into some of the characteristics and go from there. But I thought it would be fun to have you just set up the story part.

Give us just a tease, if you will, a summary and the key players in this book. So the key character was actually one of the primary characters in the five dysfunctions of a team. And essentially, he was the guy who got demoted so that the main character in that book could come in. And so he's a humble guy and a good guy. Well, it's about him getting a out of the high-tech world and the Silicon Valley. And he decides to move to Napa. And to his surprise, his uncle wants him to run his construction firm, a fairly large construction firm. So he takes over a business he doesn't know much about and he's kind of interning there and learning the ropes. And for one reason or another, he has to take over the firm. And it's at a really

critical time. And they've got big projects to do. And they're really struggling with the kind of people they should be hiring because too many of them are leaving. The founder of the company, his uncle says, I'm all about teamwork, but he doesn't really know what that means. And if they can't figure out how to hire a whole bunch of people very fast, they're going to go out of business. And so him and his two lieutenants at the firm, a woman and a guy, they decide that they have to figure out how they're going to bring on, you know, a lot of employees in short time who can fit their culture. And it makes them really anxious about understanding what it takes to be a team player.

So it's about them dissecting that in the real world and figuring out of the employees they do have which of them fit and which of them don't. So there's a sense of urgency. see there's a sense of potential loss and anxiety that propels them to do this. And so the book is about whether or not they're going to be able to solve this and whether or not they're going to be able to implement it. So I think that's a decent overview of kind of what the story is about. Oh, it really is. And I love how this is really playing off of the bestselling book, the five dysfunctions of a team. You actually write about that and how this book, the ideal team player, and more specifically,

the three essential virtues, how it plays into the five disfunctions of a team. And this book was really born out of, is it safe to say born out of that book or certainly the research or the anecdotal things your team, the table group was learning as a result of the five dysfunctions of a team? Yeah, I think to a certain extent it is, I mean, definitely the book is about how to better implement the five dysfunctions by understanding the individual characteristics of the individual team members. So in other words, the five dysfunctions is about, okay, you got 10 people in a room and how do you make them work together, what are the behaviors you need and the exercises you need to do and how to do that. But then the question is, are there some individuals that plug into

that team better than others because of their individual characteristics? And the answer is yes. And so that's what this book is about. What's interesting is that this book actually predated the five disfunctions because the three values, the three virtues I talk about in this book came from the core values I used before I even started my company when I was in a different organization. And so, but at the time, we had no idea what these values meant. And it was our clients who would hear about our values and say, hey, we want to use those too. And we'd say, no, you can't use those values.

Those are ours. You've got to come up with your own. What we didn't realize is these are the universal values of a team player, of teamwork. So it was kind of a happy accident, if you will. But this book is definitely a compliment to the five dysfunctions. It actually just came about before it. What are you hearing from readers who have read five dysfunctions and now they've digested this book?

I think that it's a perfect add-on. They're like, okay, we get the five dysfunctions, we're working on things. But if we apply this as well, we jumpstart that process again and help individuals learn about how to do it even better. And the response to this book has been better than any book we've ever written. Why do you think that is? You know, I think certainly part of it is that we're better known. So there's more people saying, hey, Pat Lincone wrote a book, so we'll read it. So I think that the other thing is it is such a compliment to the five dysfunctions

that there's so many readers out there who feel like this is a great next step. We don't have data around this, but I'm guessing that a large percentage of people that are reading this are fans of the five dysfunctions and find it to be a great compliment. I'm going to suggest it is because the message is so simple based around three virtues. It's very digestible for somebody. So there's more people willing to say, all right, I'm going to look at these three instead of 13, if you will, or 30. And then I think the way that they all work together is so beautiful that people can get it. And so we're going to start diving into this, folks. This is like,

this is like Ken's book notes here. Okay, so jump into page 157. The chapter's entitled defining the three virtues. I mean, that's what we really want to unpack. And they are very simple, humble, hungry, and smart. So Pat, I'm going to tee you up. And these are just the callout box on page 157 right here. Humility is, as you write, is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player. Why? Why is it the most indispensable? Because if a person is fundamentally more interested in themselves than others, teamwork just doesn't happen. It just doesn't get off the ground. I mean, at the most basic level, a team is where people come together and put the interests of the whole, the greater good ahead of their own individual interests. And without that,

there's nothing. I mean, you're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It's not enough. It's not enough. And that's the hard part. I was thinking about this this morning about the fact that you can be humble and still not be a great team player, which seems like, how is that possible? And we could talk about that. But without humility, everything else is a non-starter. Because the premise here, and I believe that this is part of embedded in human beings. We call it original sin.

And that is we don't come out of the womb thinking about others. We come out of the womb thinking about ourselves. And there's something countercultural about saying, I'm going to care about other people more than myself. And very few people do that naturally. they have to learn it and realize that that's critical. And then if you can do that and you develop that kind of humility, you have the biggest advantage in becoming a team player.

Well, since you put that kind of importance on humility, and I agree with you, the next page 158, you break down something. I want to stay here before we move to hungry. You said there's two basic types of people who lack humility. And I think we all have the instant image of somebody, at least one of those two types. And you say it's the most obvious kind, of course, the overtly arrogant people who make everything about them. But I want to spend time on the next one because when I read this, Pat, I was like, huh, I've never thought of it this way. The second type of person who lacks humility is much less

dangerous, I'm reading here, but still worth understanding. This is the key line. These are people who lack self-confidence, but are generous and positive with others. Explain that person and how they hurt the team with their lack of humility. Yeah, and it's interesting to look at the nuances of this. It's that person who's not an ego-driven person or not an overconfident, arrogant person. They're not boastful at all. In fact, they're very reluctant to do that. That's not the problem. It's sometimes people with that characteristic also have a diminished sense of their own self-worth,

or they don't really understand the gifts they bring to the table that make the team better. So in other words, at first people look at them and go, well, they're a great team player. They're not self-centered. They're not arrogant. They don't brag. But at the same time, what people don't realize is they're also not advocating for their points of view that would help the team. They also downplay the importance of themselves in terms of their skills. And so they're not bringing to bear on the team all the goodness that they could bring.

And so, yes, they're not as annoying in the fact that they don't call attention to themselves and distract the team that way. But in a quiet way, they're depriving the team of their goodness. Now, there's one element of that. Now, some people that are like that are actually very positive about their teammates. They'll champion others. but not themselves. And that can be a problem. The worst kind of person, I would say probably even worse

than the overtly arrogant person because at least you know where they're coming from, is that quiet person who doesn't brag about themselves, but they can't celebrate others either. They're bitter and they try to drag people down with them. So they're like, well, I don't think very much of myself,

but because of that, I don't think very much of you either. And if you do something well, I'm probably going to try to tear you down because I don't want to feel bad about being less than you. So there's two sides of the equation. the overtly bragging person and the person who lacks self-confidence. Among the people who lack self-confidence are those that are at least positive about others. And then there's some who are not

positive about themselves. So there are some nuances to this. Now, the first and most obvious thing we have to look out for is those people that are just inherently self-centered. Right. So that's the first and most easy violation of humility. But man, it's that person that hides it who doesn't have self-confidence, but also does not want other people to feel good about themselves. That's really dangerous. So much of our audience really cares about personal growth. So let's just stay here and a nuanced question on this humility discussion, whether you're young or maybe you're just not as self-aware as you'd like to be and you're listening in here. Pat, I want you to talk about the balance between tremendous confidence. This is the flip side. You've got the person you just mentioned

who is the quiet, non-bragadocious person, but very impressed with themselves and so impressed with themselves. They're almost like a lone wolf. They don't want to contribute to anybody else. But what about the person who wants to be humble? Certainly here's this stuff and says, I don't want to be that arrogant braggadocious. It's all about me, but I'm super confident in what I can do and what I want to do. How do I balance that? How do you balance that tremendous confidence, but still remain humble? Well, and that's the interesting thing. CS Lewis defined humility is not thinking less of yourself. I mean, if you're confident because you do know you have good skills and there's things that you can do, that's not a lack of humility.

C.S. Lewis said, it's not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking about yourself less. And I think in our society, sometimes we're looking for people that are, that are kind of self-deprecating, maybe even meekness is a good thing. It's a great virtue. Jesus talked about that, but that are unnecessarily meek or demure, that we think that's almost a requirement. Confidence is a good thing. I mean, if God gave you a talent and you have it, not having confidence and that seems to me like a violation of humility. The question is, is when you're overconfident or your confidence brings attention to yourself

because you need that at the expense of others. So, you know, another definition of humility that I once heard is knowing that you're not God, so anything you have is a gift. That doesn't mean you deny that gift. It just means that you don't think it comes from you. So I don't think that confidence is a lack of humility at all. And there are people that will accuse somebody

of, boy, you're awfully confident. It's like, well, actually, I just can do things pretty well in this area. There's nothing wrong with admitting that. It's what you do with it that makes you not humble. All right, so we'll move to the next virtue, page 159. This is how you talk about hungry people. Hungry people almost never have to be pushed by a manager to work harder because they are self-motivated and diligent. Talk about the virtue of hunger.

Yeah, and this is probably the most straightforward one. And that is just there are people in the world, and it's probably because of life experiences or how they were raised or things that happened to them who just are so antithetical to the idea of being a slacker. The idea that they would ever shortarm something or do less than was required or not do more than what was required is so hard for them that they just are that kind of person. This is not a workaholic. That's not it. It's just that they're always going to want to do a little bit more than required and look around the corners and go above and beyond. They're the kind a person who thinks that being, I don't want to say on time means you're 15 minutes early,

because that's a different personality trait. But they just think that if you're not doing more and volunteering to help your colleagues and really looking at the whole and willing to dive in and do whatever is necessary, even if it's lower level work or higher level work, it doesn't matter. That kind of person is a hungry person. And I think most people know that great team players are that kind of person. Now, the interesting thing about it is this is the most straightforward of the three virtues. I think it might be the hardest to instill an person who didn't develop it on their own fairly early. I agree with that.

And in fact, why do you agree with that, Ken? Tell me about that. Because I was sitting there listening to you. And I was going to add to your definition of hungry people. I think there are people who just naturally, they have an ambition. I call it a high motor. And it's about pushing themselves. For instance, you know, the great winners in sport are people who didn't just win once or

twice, they always won all the time. Like Peyton Manning is the, I think the most recent example. Some people would call it obsessive or maniacal. But I think what's underneath all of that, and those two adjectives may be true, but I think there's a hunger for him to push himself to get better, to maximize. For me, I'm, I got to tell you, I'm hungry. And for me, it's just about pushing myself and making sure I get the most out of me. Exactly. And you look at a guy like that. Steph Curry is another one who just pushes himself so hard and works out so hard. I happen to know one of his trainers too and the guy is so self-motivated. Now, what you've got in Steph Curry and Peyton Manning though is, and it's great because take that hunger that they have and then apply it to

the fact that it's not about them, it's about their team. They're humble as well. Both of those guys. And I've met Peyton Manning and I was extraordinarily impressed by the way he talked to me and the way he carried himself. It was just like what I've seen on TV. He's very demure. He's very quiet. He's self-deprecating. And it was very genuine. And I know people that know Steph Curry, he's the same way.

When you combine those two things, that's beautiful. Now, there are people in the world that are really hardworking, and they're very insecure, and they want everyone to know that about them. And then you can see how that can sometimes hurt a team. But hunger alone is so important. And like when I watched the draft, like in football and other things, when they say a guy has a high motor, those are always my favorite guys. I want that guy who's going to go, give me some more workouts to do.

Let me help on special teams. Let me do whatever you need me to do versus somebody who's like, have I done enough? Can I go home now? And to me, that's the biggest deal breaker when I hire somebody if I'm interviewing them and I feel like they're looking for ways to not have to work hard. That's when I just can't deal with. That's right. So let's stay here.

I can't, I don't know how you teach hunger or how, because you started this. You said it's the one that maybe the heart. to develop. Let's just say that these virtues are muscles. I think it's so hard because so much of it is environmental how they grow up. So how do you take an adult who may be in their mid-20s or mid-30s or for heaven's sake, mid-40s and grow the hunger in them? Is that possible? And I'm not trying to shoot that all the theories hold. But here's where I'm going with this. If you can't instill it or develop it, then, hey, it's an easy decision. They've got to get them off the bus. Yeah. I think the best way, I think there's two ways to develop.

Because I think about myself. So I grew up fairly lower middle class. We didn't have much money. So I had that going for me, which I mean that in terms of hunger. And then I had a dad who worked really hard and he had a strong work ethic, kind of an old country work ethic. So it was role modeled for me from an early age. And I thought that was the definition of what it meant to work.

So I was at an advantage. Now, I do a little bit better than my dad did or maybe a lot better than my dad did. God rest his soul. And so my kids didn't grow up with that deprivation. And the thing is, as much as I didn't try to spoil my kids, they had an easier go of it than I did, no doubt about it. I mean, it's impossible not to. But they saw that I worked really hard and that I was constantly doing things, whether it was coaching their teams or at my office or other pursuits I did. They were like, man, dad's always going, going, going, going.

So they probably have a role model, which helps. I would say a young person who never had a role model growing up of that is going to have a hard time. But that's not to say that it's impossible at all. it just has to click in for them and their desire to achieve something through sacrifice it can get instilled later in life but it's a harder thing I think

even then unbelievably humility and the third virtue which is smart so it's one of those things that boy it's sure when I interview people for smart Ken I ask him about their childhood I do and I ask it it's funny like I don't care what their grades were necessarily I find out did you work hard

in high school did you study hard did you work hard in your jobs? Did you be on a team where you had to bust your butt? And if a person doesn't have any ability to relate to any of those things, it's a hard go. But definitely people do realize it later in life. Sometimes it's through suffering. Sometimes it's realizing like, man, I can't play video games all day and still have the life I want to lead.

I can't take care of my family. And then it kicks in. So it can be learned, but I think it has to be self-learned through experience. It's not one of those classroom teaching things. Yes, I agree. All right, so page 160, this is the third virtue, this is Smart. And when I first saw the book title and the subtitle, I wondered where you were going with Smart. So this was really refreshing for me. I love the way that you define this. Smart simply refers to a person's common sense about people. That's very different than I think how most of us would fill in the blank there on Smart. Right. And it's common sense around people. And that's just so much different than intellectual capacity. And I used to kind of apologize for this because some people say, why'd you call it smart? Well, I called it that because that's what we called it for years. We just always called it smart.

And it was actually when I went out for Dave's Entree Leadership Summit, I thought about Dave, and I thought, there's a big difference between somebody being smart and someone being intellectual or intelligent. And like Dave would say, just because you have a PhD and you scored high in your SATs, if you're buying a car that you can't afford or leveraging yourself in debt, you're just dumb. And what I mean is that smart is really more. about common sense. And in this case, it's how you apply that to the people you're working with on a day-to-day basis. And it's good to make people kind of say, what do you mean by smart? Because it's just too easy to say, hi, EQ, because that's a little bit more, I don't know,

it's a little bit more complex and all that. This is just like, are you the kind of person that can sit in a room across from somebody and know that if you say something, it's going to be received poorly? Or if somebody's pissed off, excuse my French, you kind of know that and you're not going to do something to make it worse. So we use this term because we want to say, just have common sense and just be bright in how you deal with others. It's not complicated, but it's hugely valuable. It seems to me, Pat, that this virtue may be the one that could get abused a bit much, meaning you've got, I talked to somebody the other day. The guy came to fix my HVAC. Yeah. Had a small air conditioning issue this weekend. Thank goodness it was small.

And he was telling me about his business. Great guy. Great service. So I started asking him about his business. I said, man, you've won me for life. Love what you do. Tell me about your business. And so he starts telling me, he tells me about a problem guy. He says, my best technician. Guy's incredible.

Super gifted. Best install guy. Best just can fix anything. He's smartest guy I've ever employed. But he just, you know, doesn't get along with the team. And I think I see this a lot. You know, you get somebody who's super valuable in their tactical role. But if you look at your true definition here of what a smart team member looks like,

they cause a lot of problems. It seems like leaders have such a hard time getting rid of somebody like that or at least trying to confront them to see if they can clean up their act simply because they're so smart, book smart. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you see this in all fields that it's like they're capable technically, but they're not good at dealing with people. And of course, what that means is they're not capable because if you can't, unless you have a job where you never, I suppose there are some fields out there. There's probably some levels of research that you could lock a person in a room, let them slip the paper under the door after they've come up with something. But most people can only be effective in as much as they can work with others and through others. And so, and I've done this.

I've made this mistake before. I've made it on youth sports teams that I was drafting kids for my son's teams. And there was a kid that had great technical ability. I knew he was going to be a problem. And I thought, I'll be able to work with him. And I just thought, oh, man, I always regret that. And I see it all the time in business. People go, well, this guy's brilliant.

He's a great marketer. He's a great strategist or a great engineer. but then you just don't calculate the opportunity cost of what that's going to do to the other people on the team. And I will tell you, Ken, years ago, I hired somebody who was not smart. And she wasn't humble either, so it was a dumb, a dual thing. And darn it, she made everybody frustrated, but she got a lot of work done for me, not in the team. And so I promoted her like an idiot. And my staff members came to me and said, if you really believe in this stuff, you should not be promoting people that don't value this.

And they were right. and so I couldn't go fire this person. I had to work with her and try to get her to be more humble and more smart. She couldn't. So I managed her out into a different part of this large, I was a different, a big company and not every department needed people like I did. So she was able to succeed somewhere else. But the moral of the story was when she left the department,

the performance of everyone else went through the roof. And you see this on sports teams that people go, well, how can we get rid of that guy? He's so talented. He doesn't work well with others. But he says things that piss everybody off, but we can't get rid of them. And then when you finally do, other people step up. And this is the thing we have to understand is there's a cost to keeping non-smart people around on your team.

Now, work with them, hold them accountable, try to teach them. Because if they're humble and they're not smart, they can usually learn how to do this. But if they don't have that capacity for looking at themselves and improving, it's going to cost the team. And ultimately, your overall performance is going to suffer. The genius in this book is the ideal team player model where you begin to break this thing down and work with them together. It starts on page 165. We don't have time to cover each one of these individually. It's not fair to you, Pat.

So I'm just going to kind of break these down and then ask a question. So first thing Pat does is he talks about the categories, the three qualities. So you've got people who only have one of the three. So this is the humble only person. That's the pawn. Again, you can go read this stuff. It's pretty self-explanatory. Hungry only, that's the bulldozer.

We know those folks. Smart only, that's the charmer. Then you go into people who have two of the three virtues. So, an example, humble and hungry, but not smart. That's the accidental messmaker. Again, you folks go read this stuff. He breaks it down. That's great.

Then humble and smart, but not hungry. That's the lovable slacker. And then, hungry and smart, but not humble. That's the skillful politician, and many of us are sick of those guys. Here's what I want to go to. at the end of that chapter, page 172, in big bold letters, it jumped off the page to me, it says warning. And this is what I want to focus on, because this book is so practical, and so folks are going

to read this, Pat, leaders, and they're going to say, all right, or maybe even for self-discovery, which is important. And they begin to try to label themselves, and it makes a lot of sense. But you have a warning, and essentially you're saying, be careful not to be too specific with these labels, why is that? Explain that warning. Well, first of all, people aren't black or white. They're not fixed in a certain way. So you don't want to label somebody and make them feel like they're stuck there. Secondly, we often will look at a person who's pretty humble and pretty smart. They're clearly in that area, but they're a little less hungry, but they're still hungry. They're still

an ideal team player, but they're a little less than the others. And we tend to think, oh, that must mean they're a lovable slacker. And it's like, no, actually, they're in the middle. They're a great team player, that's the area that they might be able to improve on a little bit. So rather than just understanding that that's their area of improvement, we actually label them as having a decided deficit in that area. And that's dangerous because then people go, what do you mean I'm a lovable slacker? Just because I'm a lot more humble and smart than I am hungry doesn't mean I'm bad. And so I really do warn people about that. Now, the reason why we use these labels is because it really helps to remember what it looks like, what it looks like when somebody decidedly lacks one of

virtues. And I think the ones when they lack just one are the most important, like that skillful politician, that person is smart and hungry but not humble, but they're smart enough to pretend they're humble. That's the most dangerous kind of person. So when you see that label, you think, man, I worked with a person like that once. They were definitely a skillful politician. That was crushing to the rest of the group. But then you don't want to slide people in there that don't belong there. And just because you're an ideal team player doesn't mean you're perfect. It doesn't mean you're perfect. So that's what we try to say is use those to understand what this looks like in the extremes, but don't apply it to the nuances. All right. So you and I, full disclosure here,

the audience knows I'm a big sports fan, so is Pat. And we have had some fun conversations breaking down sports and football in general. And so this is a question for you, Pat, because I think this hits a lot of leaders. Based on the conversation we just had, the warning, meaning that you've got some people that are ideal team players, but one or two of the three, they may not be as proficient in naturally, so they've got to work on it. When you think of great superstars, we mentioned Steph Curry, we mentioned Peyton Manning, there's probably other examples that come to mind. When you're a superstar, and I grew up in 80s, so I'm thinking Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, they were the alpha males, They were these superstars, but they were on great teams.

How does the superstar play that role that comes with being the superstar, meaning the clutch performer, when the game's on the line, the balls in your hands, yet still be a great teammate? Because there have been superstars statistically that aren't great teammates. I'm not going to mention names. It's not what we're after. But I think of Magic Johnson. I think the guy was a great teammate. I think Larry Bird was as well. What are your thoughts on that?

because I think there are a lot of leaders who say, I've got a superstar, but I want to make sure they're the ideal team player as well. Is there nuances there within that context of maybe those three virtues, one is a little bit greater than the other or less than? Yeah, you know, I think that when you're super talented, the first thing you want to know is a person has humility or not. And I think the question is, would Bird and Magic, or any team player, would they prefer to win and get less attention for themselves? That's the first thing. I mean, is it really about winning? I look at the series going on right now with the Warriors and the Cavaliers. And, you know, the truth is, Steph Curry has not had that many great games.

He's a little injured, but also the matchups against the Cavaliers, they've tried to shut him down. So, heck, the backup point guard, Sean Livingston, has had a great series. And I've not heard or seen one instance of Steph complaining about him. The first ever unanimous MVP is not even on the court half the time. because the matchups mean that these other guys do better. He'd rather win than be the MVP. And so that's the kind of thing you want to look for. Now, there's some people that are so talented,

but at the end of the day, it's like, if I don't get to be the superstar, then it's just not worth it to me. And you can go through sports of all kinds and players and understand what that means. And oftentimes their teams don't do as well as they do individually. And so that's the first thing you want to ask yourself. Yes, that's it. Because every team has a superstar, essentially. Sometimes they don't, but getting the right kind of superstar is huge. All right, so let's move forward. So we've talked about all these virtues and how it helps us. The biggest application, it's page 174. You simply say, you know, here's how you apply this. I want you to walk through what you think. If people are reading this book and they really get this, how are they applying this to get the most?

Well, there's two ways to use this, two basic ways. One is to apply it to the people that work in your organization. Not everybody's hiring a new team right now. So go to your team right now and say, let's figure out where we can improve. Because the more that we grow in humility, hungry, and smarts, the more we're aware of that, the better our team will be. So there's self-assessments in the book that people can take and there's surveys here. This book has more tools in it than any book I've ever written of a fable. So there's lots of things in the back that people can put into practice. One of the exercises we encourage people do with their current teams is just go around the table and how everybody, after they understand what the

virtues are, have everyone rank themselves first through second through third on where they are on these virtues. What's my best? What's my second? What's my third? So even about somebody who's a strong team player is going to have a third and somebody who's weak in many is going to have a third, it's not very threatening. And then we have them tell everybody at the table, this is my weakest area. And then we group them by like weaknesses and have them consult to one another. Like, so what can we do to make ourselves more humble? And I've done this with teams and it's crazy that that person who lacks humility that I would think would never admit it, they'll say, oh yeah, I realize this is my third of three. And they come up with real specific ways to be more humble, to take an interest in others,

to not call attention to themselves, to talk less in meetings. And it's pretty crazy when people look at somebody and go, so you know that about yourself and you're willing to do something. And they're like, oh yeah, I want to get better too. So that's one of the applications is to current people on your team, helping them self-assess and put together a little development plan for improving in that area. That's a very powerful thing on a team. The other is to make sure you're never hiring people that are demonstrably lacking in humility, hunger, or smarts. And there's interview questions and assessments that you can use and not only interview questions,

but tactics for interviewing to get at the truth about a person's underlying ability to be humble, hungry, and smart. So if you're a manager out there and you've got a new hire to make, man, invest some time and understanding how you can do this. because the avoiding hiring somebody that lacks hunger or humility or smarts is worth so much because the cleanup you have to do and the cost to your team and the distraction of hiring somebody who's lacking in these areas is huge. So those are the two basic ways.

Apply it to your current team, apply it to future members. And there's a ton of advice and structure in here about how to apply that in short-term focus. So good. All right, I want to put you on the spot. And when I say this, I want you to really bring it. okay, because I'm healthy enough to ask this question and let you do this for our audience. I have not taken the assessment yet. I'm going to take the assessment, but I haven't. However, I want you to give me some advice because there's some people who may be sitting in my seat

and so will help those folks at my expense. Are you good with this? Well, I think so. Now, this assumes that I have a, if it's about you, a deep knowledge of you and how you are in a team, you know, you and I are friends and colleagues and we deal, do this stuff, but I've not seen you on a team, but I'll play. We'll see how it goes. Of the three, no question in my mind, hungry, I'm off the charts. I mean, I just want more, do more hungry, hungry, hungry, very much. Pretty good people skills, but I think I'm pretty humble guy, but I think there are days where that humility jumps up and down.

I'm just asking you to coach me here for people like me. We're self-promoters, we want the ball. I want the ball with the clock ticking down. I want to be a quarterback in a throwing offense, not all the time handing the ball off. Keeping that healthy, keeping that in check. And I'm just picking on me here. But what do you say to somebody like that who, again, I would say that's my humility may be the lesser of the three for me just because of naturally how I am. So my advice is the first thing is that you can tell people that is a huge sign.

So because that's not easy. But if you could say to people that you work with, hey, I think this is the one that I sometimes come up a little short in. That's the first sign. The second sign is to say that I know where it comes from and I know why it's not a good thing. And I actually, I'm not only inviting you to call me on it, I'm asking you to. And I'm going to explain to you why I think I do that sometimes because usually there's some insecurity and I can relate to that. We all can.

And if you can be that vulnerable with your team and then the first time that you feel yourself doing it or someone calls you on it, if you can celebrate that and acknowledge it, and be that buck naked with your team in that moment, that's a huge step in the right direction. The other thing is, here's an interesting one, find the people on your team that are truly the most humble in the right way, and tell them and tell other people on the team that you want to be more like them

because you think they exceed you in that virtue. I think one of the best things a humble person can do is find other people who are better than them and celebrate them, and that's a huge sign. So I think look for people that work for you or with you and say, I'm going to ask you to teach me how to be more like you because I admire you and wish I were more like you in this area. And then ask everybody else to call you on it. Because it's in those moments when your lack of humility or your insecurity spikes, that's probably the best place to deal with it. To go, oh gosh, this is awful.

And I know it. I get it too, Ken. I can relate to that. I think I'm an equal opportunity bad team player at times. I can stink at all of these. But I can really relate to the humility thing. I get it. And I think there's some Myers-Briggs that goes with that too, you know. And when you do that, you've got to call it out. You've got to celebrate other people. You've got to make it easy for other people to acknowledge it. And it's going to be painful. If there's no pain, you're not going to be growing. So the next time you feel that way, when you're at your most vulnerable, call it out and say, oh, you guys, I think what I'm doing right now is kind of self-centered. And man, when they start calling you on it and talking to you about that, that's a beautiful thing. That's a beautiful thing. That's so good. I hope that it'd make you uncomfortable because I'm not uncomfortable saying that.

And I'm really just, that's an exercise for our audience. So I thought picking on me is fine. And again, it's just something that we all need. That's why I love this book right there is that exercise. So I know I put you on the spot, but I appreciate that. No, you know what's great. And tell the people that work with you, when I'm at that moment where the last thing you want to do is remind me about this, that's when I need you to do it. Yeah, exactly, right?

It's so true. That's good. Oh, it's so fun. Well, he is Pat Lynchioni. The new book is The Ideal Team Player. How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues. It's wherever books are sold. Real quick, Pat, tell folks how they can connect with the Table Group and everything you guys are doing.

We can go to our website, TableGroop.com. There are all kinds of resources on there. Lots of stuff. You can give us a call. You can look at any of the books we have. I mean, just Google us. You'll find us. And we love to help people in a variety of different ways.

That's why we're here. It's fun for us. All right. Thanks, Pat. We appreciate it, man. Hey Ken, take care. God bless you. Well, I hope you can understand why I told Eric the producer before we did the interview that Pat's one of my top five favorite people to interview. That's why. I just find him to be so amazingly gifted at taking complex things like behaviors, working within teams, and giving a simple transferable truth. I think he's great at it. So I want to give you one other one. And you hear me many times. When you're listening to the interview, I'm literally learning with you. That's one thing. That's one thing. thing that I wrote down that I want to call back because I think it's huge for me. And I picked on

myself with humility. You know, I want it, I want more. And that can just skew a little bit too much self-centered and not within the construct and context of what's best with the team, the right timing, so forth and so on. There's one other thing. I loved, and you heard me call this out in the interview when he said the definition of smart. I actually read it. Smart simply refers to a person's common sense about people. He wrote this in the book, page 160. Smart people just have good judgment and intuition around the subtleties of group dynamics and the impact of their words and actions. You know, listen, if we're being honest, sometimes a lot of us are just dumb. We're smart in general. We may fall in this smart category, and we are an ideal team player,

but we all have these moments where we're just dumb in dealing with people. And what Pat said in the interview, I want to call back. I asked him about that idea of being smart with people, not just smart with books and smart with your job. And he said, smart refers to how effective you are working with and through others. That's a great definition. As you do assessments day to day, working with your team, how effective are you working with and through others? We're all going to have bad days.

Some of us may have bad seasons, bad weeks, but together we're going to have to be honest with each other. So when we have those bad days, we go, that was not smart, that was dumb. And I got to watch out for the contributing factors that made me dumb in that moment. But I thought that was brilliant. Smart team players are people that are effective working with and through others.

That's huge. That's what I've got to work on. So that's why I wrote it down. Hope that help you. Well, I've mentioned to you folks before that Pat Lynch-Jone has been a speaker at both of our summit events. In fact, this last summit event, he got five-star rating from 98% of the audience. He was such a big deal. I was backstage when Dave went up to and said, hey, man, you got to come back next year.

That was so good. So we said, let's look at his May calendar. So he literally got his assistant over there, looked at the dates, Orlando, Florida, in May 2017, and he is coming back. And so we want to offer a special discount for Summit, only to you podcast listeners. Now, Eric and I have been talking about this. We want some podcast-only offers. So Becky and Damon on the Entree Leadership team, they came up with one. Here it is, very simple.

If you talk to our sales advisors, you can go to Entreeleadership.com. call in, online, however you want to get in touch with them. And you mentioned the Lynchioni podcast discount for Summit 2017. They'll give you a $300 cut on the ticket. That's going to take $300 off. That's a lot of dough. This is a super weak, super valuable. And also, you get to come to the Ken Coleman podcast meetup.

So they put this together. I love this. They asked me if I do it. I said, absolutely, because I love meeting you, folks. I meet a ton of you anyway, but I guess we're going to have a little get-together, right, Eric? And will we have some goodies for them as well? All right, and good conversation. I mean, this is going to be fun.

I'll take questions. I'd love to hear your comments on how we make this thing better for you. And this would be really fun, as we just kind of have a fun conversation about our favorite conversations on this podcast. Because I hear so much from you folks that you feel like I'm learning alongside of you, and the fact is I am. So this will be a lot of fun. We're going to do this for the first time a podcast audience meetup. Nobody else gets to come, Eric. Nobody.

If you don't listen to this podcast, you don't get to come. That's the deal. And you save $300 on the best leadership event in the world. So again, all details, entreleadership.com. Click on events. You'll see the summit in Orlando, May 2017. Mention the Lynchione podcast discount. 300 bucks.

And then you get access. You get a ticket. to the Ken Coleman meetup. Oh boy. I hope that doesn't disincentivize anybody. Because if you don't want to come to the meetup, that's optional. You'll still get the $300 discount and you won't hurt my feelings and we won't make you come. There you go.

I feel better about giving people that out. But no, it really is going to be a lot of fun. All right, folks, speaking of giving, we have an amazing, amazing tool that is really helping people. Already getting amazing feedback on the Entree, July. giveaway. That's our 90-day plan to help you jumpstart new employees. So much good stuff in the tool. We've told you a lot about it, but I want to remind you, you can still get it. It's absolutely free. Text the phrase, new hire. Just slam the two words new and hire together. Text it to 3344.344. Or if you'd rather, you can go to this episode's show notes at entreleadership.com.

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What does your SEO look like? And a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of entree leaders think they haven't figured out. And they go, no, I know what I'm doing. in the SEO. Almost every entrepreneur that I speak with is doing it wrong. There are certain strategies we've learned from working with tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and small businesses here in InfusionSoft where we know exactly what it takes to empower your SEO. So we've taken all these learnings together and we've put them in a concise guide for you to download so you know exactly what you need to do, what you're doing right and most importantly what you're doing wrong to make

sure you're getting the ROI that you need to to make your business and more importantly your credibility, something that people want to be a part of. We understand the pains and challenges that you're facing. Go to infusionsoft.com forward slash SEO basics and Fusionsoft.com forward slash SEO basics and start improving your SEO strategy today. We want to thank Chad Kirby and InfusionSoft for their contribution to this podcast. They help us power this thing and they're helping you. He gave me the URL. If you need it, it is in the show notes on this episode, of course, at entreel leadership.com. You can always visit Infusionsoft at infusionsoft.com slash entree.

Well, I want to thank Pat Lynchioni for spending time with us. That guy is such a help to us. He's a big part of our Entree leadership tribe and a dear friend. So really, really thankful to Pat. And to you, the audience, as I always say, but I truly mean on behalf of our producer, Eric Anthony and the entire Entree leadership team. We are so grateful that you listen. We'll talk with you again.

Very soon.