How do you define and identify “The Ideal Team Player”?

What are the specific traits of the “ideal team player”? And how to recognize this ideal team player when you meet her/him? That’s a key question in recruitment that we’ve been asking ourselves for years. After our long-term efforts and experiments, we’ve managed to build a fantastic team of skilled, educated people that are matching our values. With years of experience and over 500 interviews conducted, we’ve acquired some kind of “instinct for talent”. A few years ago we realized that we could in general detect, with little errors, if a candidate would be a good fit or not in the first 2 minutes of an interview. And if we take 60 minutes, we would get an accurate profile of the person and know if we should hire or not that person. It sounds nice BUT it’s actually flawed. Because what do we base our “instinct” on? What happens if we can’t make the final interview? And previous interviews, what are they based on? We think that most interviewers in our team get a feeling of “this person will match with our team” or “that person won’t fit in the team” and in general, projecting a candidate in its future team is a good way of imagining interactions and figuring out if it could work or not. BUT that’s still based on “instincts and feelings”. So how could we make it systematic??

We found a good answer in the form of a 3 values framework in a book called “The ideal team player” by Patrick Lencioni. It’s a short book, written as a fable, that follows another management fable called “the 5 dysfunctions of a team” that we also do recommend. The 3 values of the ideal team player according to this book are Humble, Hungry, and Smart People :

• Humility is the most important virtue of the three. Great team players don’t have big egos or concerns about status. They are quick to point out the contributions of others and generally don’t seek attention for their own. They define success collectively and not individually.?
• Hungry people are always looking for more. More to do. More to learn. More responsibility. They rarely have to be pushed to work harder because they’re self-motivated and diligent. They’re always thinking about the next step and the next opportunity.?
• Smart. In the context of teamwork, being smart is not about one’s intellectual capacity. Instead, smart team players have good common sense about people. They tend to know what is happening in the group and how to deal effectively with others. They ask good questions, listen to what others are saying and stay engaged in conversations.?

All three of these attributes are necessary for the ideal team player. If even one is missing in a coworker, teamwork becomes much more difficult and sometimes even impossible.?