Why we’re reading “The Ideal Team Player”
At Fervor, we’re all about “ideal.” We want everything from Ideal Advocates to ideal growth to ideal happy hours. So when we heard about a book called The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni, we figured it was an ideal fit.
One of our mantras, “winning inside first” is all about investing in our employees inside the company in order to have the greatest impact outside. That’s why we thought it was time for the first ever Fervor book club, and this was the perfect book to start with.
The Ideal Team Player reveals the core virtues for a strong team member. Winning inside your organization is the most meaningful thing you can do. Plus, employee engagement drives growth. So let’s take a look at what we learned from the book and how we’re applying it.
Why The Ideal Team Player — “People first” is one of the core tenants of the Fervor Manifesto. So when a friend of Fervor, Dusty Clevenger of Acumen, recommended The Ideal Team Player to Fervor CEO Mike Farag and Fervor Chief of Staff Lori Zehr, they were both intrigued. “I fell in love with the book,” Lori said. “It’s a framework for building a healthy team, with balanced expectations and shared perspective. I knew reading it as a team would have a lot of impact.”
The heart of The Ideal Team Player — Unlike many other business books, this one begins with a fable. A business leader discovers the three virtues of an ideal team player: hungry, humble and smart. “So many books provide multiple steps to success, but they’re not always simple to execute,” Lori says. “This book teaches us that we do our best work for our clients when we cultivate a team that is hungry, humble and smart, and that’s a goal that’s both practical and possible.”
Fervor’s first book together — The Fervor team has anything but a lot of extra time on our hands, but Lori and Mike knew it was important to put the team first and encourage growth, personally and professionally. “Putting our internal team first is critical,” Lori said. “While we have big goals as an organization this year, our most important focus is making sure our team is healthy.”
How Fervor applies the book — The book provides practical self-assessments and manager’s assessments that allowed everyone to evaluate our strengths and areas of opportunity. Lori also utilized ideas from the book such as personality profiles to influence short-term and long-term goals.
How The Ideal Team Player will bear fruit in the future — The lessons from the book are already helping the Fervor team with assessing our work and hiring new team members, and Lori knows that will continue. It’s even affected the questions we ask during interviews of potential employees and how existing team members are evaluated. “Our clients can only thrive if our team thrives,” Lori said. “That’s why ‘people first’ is so important.”
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Ideal Team Players are crucial for our team, and yours. Discover more from Fervor on why “winning inside first” matters >>>