Quotes from Patrick Lencioni

The questions were, 'What did you accomplish?' 'What will you accomplish next?' 'How can you improve?'" "That's it?" "Not quite. The question on the back was, 'Are you embracing the values?

But no matter what is going on, there has to be something ultimately at stake. A prize, survival, sanity, success, even peace of mind.

humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.

3. How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions?

identify one particular insight from their profile that they feel highlights a weakness that they would like to address for the good of the team.

The essence of a cohesive leadership team is trust, which is marked by an absence of politics, unnecessary anxiety, and wasted energy. Every executive wants to achieve this, but few are able to do so because they fail to understand the roots of these problems, the most damaging of which is politics.

KEY POINTS—BUILDING TRUST • Trust is the foundation of teamwork. • On a team, trust is all about vulnerability, which is difficult for most people. • Building trust takes time, but the process can be greatly accelerated. • Like a good marriage, trust on a team is never complete; it must be maintained over time.

One of the best ways to recognize a cohesive team is the nature of its meetings. Passionate. Intense. Exhausting. Never boring.

Well, some teams get paralyzed by their need for complete agreement, and their inability to move beyond debate.

I don't know how else to say this, but building a team is hard.

I often like to talk with candidates in a room with multiple team members. This allows us to debrief more effectively (e.g., "What did you think he meant when he said . . . ?"). This also gives you a sense of how the candidate deals with multiple people at once, which is a critical skill on a team. Some people are much different one-on-one than they are in a group, and you need to know that.

cohesive teams fight. But they fight about issues, not personalities. Most important, when they are done fighting, they have an amazing capacity to move on to the next issue, with no residual feelings.