Are you an ideal team player? | Patrick Lencioni | TEDxUniversityofNevada

[Music] okay so I'm very excited to be here I'm also a little nervous now I speak for a living so I shouldn't be nervous but this this is probably one of the talks that there's a good chance my kids are gonna see in fact my eighth grader said you're doing a TEDx talk I said Michael I do a lot of talks ELC yeah but this is big dad I'm excited to be here because I think it's time that we changed the way we thought about success as a society in fact better yet I think it's time that we changed the way we prepare people for success at all levels of life so I'm gonna be presenting you with three very simple but I think powerful virtues that I'm convinced can drastically change the success level in anyone's life whether they're a CEO or a middle manager a middle school student or a high schooler or a recent college grad now I'm confident of this because I believe and all of this is based on the premise that life more than ever is a team sport my name is Pat Lynch onei and I have been working with teams for the past 25 years in the corporate world in another settings I've also written two books about teamwork the first one I wrote years ago it's called the five dysfunctions of a team and then recently I wrote a sequel called the ideal team player which is the basis of today's talk and where I explore those three virtues now when I say that life as a team sport I realize that could sound kind of like a cheesy cliche you know life is a team sport but I really believe it's true I mean we take for granted the fact that in the workforce today people can be on the same team as somebody that lives on the other side of the world across continents and oceans and cultures and language and that's largely because of technology but when I started my career about thirty years ago which isn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things we couldn't even imagine doing this but today because of Technology people can work together in so many different ways and as a result of that technology people are developing in organization solutions that are amazing and complex that are solving problems in business medicine and communication on every kind of field and those complex solutions demand that people collaborate and work as teams to implement them even within a company you have to work across divisional or departmental lines or with people in other companies even competitors today are having to work together to implement these important solutions this really is the era of teamwork and business but even in our personal lives teamwork has permeated everything my wife and I have four sons at home and we like to say that by the time that each of them was in middle school they had played on more teams with more coaches in more sports and gone to more darn tournaments than we did in our entire lives combined and that's to say nothing of all the other extracurricular activities that happen on teams even in the classroom teamwork is everywhere I mean my kids come home I don't know how many times they've come home with an assignment and said those four dreaded words it's a group project and I ask them that dreaded forward question who's on your team I'm not ashamed to say that more than once I've said to my son's if you want to get a good grade you might have to be prepared to do most of the work yourself teamwork is everywhere and yet we continue to train people in education and in the workforce for primarily individual and technical skills and I think that needs to change and that's why I'm gonna present to you these three simple virtues all right ok that's the end of my memorized part of my speech which freaked me out because I don't memorize anything now let's just talk all right so we're gonna go to the first slide in my book the ideal team player I explore these three simple virtues but the power of those virtues is in the commonality or them all we have to have all three if you play baseball and you're one four three hitter that's pretty good it's terrible in teamwork if you're two four three is a quarterback in passing that's pretty good you gotta be three four three when it comes to teamwork so let's talk about these three virtues let me introduce you to them and then talk about how we can identify and improve ourselves if we're lacking a knee so the first virtue of ideal team player is by far are the most important and it is humility if you want to be an ideal team player and if you want to be successful in life you really need to be humble more than ever now this is the most important because as a follower of Jesus the Bible says that the root of all sin is pride and I believe that you look at all the problems we haven't usually rooted in pride well the antidote to pride is humility so it stands to reason that this would be the most important and most of us know what humility is right it's not being ego centered or arrogant or self-centered but being about others putting others ahead of ourselves it's such an attractive and powerful thing but there's another side of humility we have to understand too it's in the minority but it's still important to understand see some people will look at another person and say she never talks about herself she never demands that we listen to her she never thinks she has the right answer she's really humble and when somebody lacks confidence it's actually not humility you see when we have an idea or a talent to deny our god-given talent is actually a violation of humility just like it is to exaggerate them CS Lewis said it best he said humility isn't thinking less of ourselves it's thinking about ourselves less but the most prominent kind of lack of humility we see in teams in the work forest and in life is arrogance and ego centeredness so this is the first and most important attribute the second one is equally simple and it is you have to be hunger you have to be hungry people who have an innate hunger about getting work done are much more successful on teams and in life and this is simply just having a strong work ethic and this is probably the easiest one to understand but I'll say this to the young people out there this is the one that you probably have to develop earliest in life when I work with people later in life who never developed an innate sense of hunger it's harder and so I talked to kids in middle school and I say do it now work hard at everything you do this is not about workaholism though workaholics are people who get their entire identity from their work and that's not what I'm saying here people who are hungry just have want to go above and beyond have a high standard for what they do and never the minimum they never do just the minimum now the third attribute of an ideal team player is what I call being smart but it's not about intellectual smarts this is about emotional intelligence common sense around how we understand people and how we use our words and actions to bring out the best possible impact in others this is so important in the world and it is do you can develop this in life being smart is one of those things that people can work on and get better at so humble hungry smart these are the three simple virtues but the key is that we have to have all three to be an ideal team player so it's really important that we learn how to identify in ourselves and others when one is lacking so what I'm gonna do now is come up with some labels which I want you to use carefully for people that lack one of these in a very serious egregious way so let's take a look at those now a person who is humble the most important one they think about others have had of themselves and they're hungry they work really hard but they lack smarts they're not emotionally intelligent we call this the accidental mess maker now the I have a lot of time for accidental mess makers they're good people they have really good intentions but they kind of create problems that they're not aware if they're like that dog that puppy I have a puppy at home and they knock things over a lot but they mean well and they poop on the carpet you have to clean up after them but because they mean well you can lack them on the nose with the newspaper and they come back for more they have a great attitude the problem with accidental mess makers is just you do have to clean up with them they create a little bit extra work and overtime you kind of get tired of having to say he's a really good guy he didn't mean it that way nonetheless of the three types that lack one of these virtues I will take the accidental mess maker the second one is also a very good client kind that's somebody who's humble the most important one and they're smart they're good at dealing with people but they lack hunger we call this kind the lovable slacker now lovable slackers the problem is their level so they're really fun to be around and they're good people they're nice people but they just do the bare minimum they don't go above and beyond and you have to constantly remind them to do more and and you have to kind of pick up their slack in an organization now I once worked with a lovable slacker a good friend of mine still is and every time I reminded him that he needed to do more he would say you're right and he was so passionate in life about everything besides work right but because he was lovable he was so fun to be with and I said to him one day I said you know you're gonna have to leave this company when you're good and ready and five years later he was out that door the truth is it's very easy to tolerate lovable slackers but they do have a problem they cause problems on a team now the third type is the most difficult type this is the person who is hungry they really want to work hard they're ambitious and they're smart so they're really good at dealing with people but they're not humble and we call this the skillful politician I'm sure your mayor here is not the skilful pug in this sense no she's probably a skillful leader but not the skillful politician in this sense skillful politicians are so smart that they know how to portray themselves as being humble which is a very dangerous thing because what they do is they interview well they go to medians and they and they say the right things they know how to kiss up to the boss or the coach or the teacher the problem is deep down inside it's about them not about others and by the time we figure it out there's usually a trail of dead bodies hidden in closets around the organization I once worked with the team with this guy on the team that was a skillful politician and he was so clever at hiding it he was so clever that he was even Canadian you see you would never suspect a Canadian they're always so nice you would never think they would be that way and we would go to meetings and this guy would be so good with people and we thought he is the ultimate team player he's wonderful and then after a while we realized man his salary is tripled half of his colleagues are gone he's been gaming this the truth of the matter is when a person lacks human but they're good at presenting themselves that can be a very dangerous thing on a team okay so what do you do with this first of all I don't want you to misuse these labels don't go back to work and say to your boss hey I think that you're a an accidental mess maker or tell your mom she's a lovable slacker you know that's gonna get you into trouble and it should apply this first to yourself but then I want you to do this here's a very simple activity go sit down with your your team at work or with your family or with the littleit team you coach and have everybody understand humble hungry and smart and then ask them to rank themselves in these three areas which one they're best at second best and third even if they're good at all of them they're gonna have a third even if they're not so good at all of them one of them's gonna be third and have them just identify which one is their third and then go around the table and ask people to explain their third and why that's theirs and then talk as a team about how people can brainstorm about how people can overcome this give each other advice that humble person you might say you know maybe shouldn't talk about yourself so much but you should ask questions about theirs and take an interest in other's lives that a hungry person that's like maybe when you're about to leave work at 450 you should check in and see if there's more work that needs to be done or that smart person at the end of meetings maybe you should ask people if you've upset anyone and learn about how you can avoid that whatever the case is what I want you to do is turn your colleagues your team members your family members into your coaches they are the best source of coaching and advice you have to become a better team player and more successful in life because the day you know that the people around you love you enough to tell you when you're doing something that you need to improve in everything changes so I want you to go home and I want you to do this and in a very short period of time you're gonna see a difference now let me leave you with this at my company of the table group we don't care when we hire people where they went to college we really don't and we don't care about their GPA or their a CT or their SAT the only three-letter acronym we care about really is H a and s and I think that's something that we need to do more of in our society whether it's professional development in our organisations or whether it's in our schools you know I think as this father of four boys I think it's time we took a little bit of the pressure off kids from just memorizing the periodic table of the elements or I Amba contamination I mean we have to learn those things I get this and kids should work hard but I think we should actually give them things that they can control in their lives that are really gonna pay off in their future and we should teach them how to be other centered not self-centered we should teach them how to work hard at everything they do school and everything else just because it's the right thing to do and third we should teach them how to be more adept interpersonally and emotionally with the people around them see I think that could make a huge difference in our corporations and in our schools and our families and I really believe that the world would be a better place and that our companies would be better places our families would be better and the individuals in society would be better if more of us were humble hungry and smart thank you and God bless you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 209,925

Rating: 4.8587761 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Book, Leadership, Success, Work, Workplace

Id: PRh80RyT74I

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020