#008 - Becoming the Ideal Team Player

Robert Greiner 0:00

Welcome to the Wanna Grab Coffee podcast. Today's episode is a recording of a presentation I gave on becoming an ideal team player at our recent new hire onboarding week. The ideal team player concept was developed by Patrick Lencioni and is critical to long term career success. In this discussion, I show how exceptional teams change the world, how exceptional teams are made up of ideal team players and the behaviors required to become an effective ideal team player. Finally, we cover some practical tips and tools that can help anyone level up their team centered behaviors. As always, don't forget to hit the subscribe button in your podcast player of choice and feel free to drop us a line at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter at Wanna Grab Coffee.

Just to start off real quickly, these are my co workers. And there is precisely a 73.6% chance that we will be interrupted by one or all of them. So, you've been forewarned. There they are. My youngest on the left there is Noah, he's three, almost four, my daughter Amelia just turned seven. And so I might actually leave you all in the middle of this presentation and go and grade some school work or teach a math lesson or something like that. So we'll just see how it goes. So today, we are going to talk about becoming the ideal team player. And I'll start off with a quick question. Actually three questions but they're pretty quick. Show of hands. Who here has been part of a really good team? sports team? Academic Team, any kind of team? Just quick show of hands. I can see everybody. Okay, good. How many have been part of a truly terrible team? Okay, great. Yes. All right, one more? How many have been the sole cause of the fact that you've been on a terrible team? Alright, yeah, a few honest few honest people. Okay, so today, we'll talk about becoming the ideal team player. And the first question we need to ask is, why should we focus on becoming an ideal team player, and it's really because exceptional teams change the world. If we want to accomplish something today, any kind of meaningful outcome, it requires collaborated and coordinated involvement from others. So my favorite example of this is Apollo 11. Right? slide rules and pocket protectors. And so long ago that it doesn't even seem like it should have worked, put someone on the moon. That's pretty cool. One of the best teams in history. On the flip side, dysfunctional teams don't change the world. One of my favorite examples of this is the fire festival, everyone, remember that? I'm so out of touch actually didn't even hear about until the documentaries had come out. But here you had this. On paper, this team that really just should have succeeded. wildly, right? Charismatic leader, lots of funding smart people, all the celebrity and influencer level endorsements that you could ever want. And yet because of dysfunction, the team cratered into one of the most public failures that we've ever seen. Right? And history is filled with examples of teams that failed despite their overwhelming resources and talent. Sports is a good analog for this. You see that happen all the time, the underdogs come up and win happens in business, the largest stages, the smallest stages, when dysfunction creeps into a team, things go really, really bad really, really fast. So I'm going to do something a little bit atypical and ask you to take out your phones if you haven't already. And go to pollEvie.com slash team player, you can also do this in your thanks right in your browser here. And you should see a question that says which area has the largest impact on your team's results? And so you can pick strong skill set, solid relationships, having a shared purpose, a team level focus. So that would be like an individual's focusing on team outcomes, taking ownership and communication. So we're seeing these come through. Thanks so much. My biggest fear is that I'll give a presentation and no one will no no participate here and we'll just stare at a blank screen awkwardly. Okay, communication is taking the lead. All right. So few on strong skill set. Several on relationships, appeal on shared purpose and most in communication. Good, okay. Thank you.

So, we've established and I think it's pretty agreeable that you want to be on an exceptional team. Exceptional teams change the world and you don't go home every day really frustrated and drained by all the drama and dysfunction on a team. So how do we build exceptional teams? Well, exceptional teams are made up of ideal team players. So it turns out that if you study teams, the strongest indicator of whether or not a team will be successful really breaks down to the individuals, right. So without that strong foundation of individual team players, organizations will continually struggle to achieve their goals no matter how straightforward they seem. And that's why especially in the business world, we see case after case of solved problems, failing spectacularly over budget, late, people quitting in the middle of the project and not having a backfill, on and on, right for applications implementations, project level outcomes that have that other people have done already, these are solve problems. And still we can't manage to, to get through them. And that's because of team dysfunction, which goes down to that individual level. So the next question, well, how do you become an ideal team player? Luckily for us, Patrick Lencioni, has answered that question. And he says that ideal team players are humble, hungry and smart. And by smart, he means people smart. So humble, puts the team before self, hungry, always in search of more, and smart plays well with others, right. And if you combine those three things together at the individual level, you will create exceptional teams.

That's it for today. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on Twitter at Wanna Grab Coffee. If you have a question or comment and want to reach out directly drop us a line at [email protected]