June 2022

The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni introduces an incredibly valuable model that will help leaders build better teams and help individuals become better teammates. 

In short, the author has identified three “virtues” that every team player has. The first virtue is that a team player is humble — meaning that he treats everyone with the same high level of respect. The second is that he is hungry — meaning that he is passionate about the success of the organization and willing to put in the effort to help achieve that success. The third is that he is smart — not referencing “book smarts” but rather people smarts — meaning he is sensitive to the impact his words, attitudes, and actions have on others. 

I strongly recommend this book. However, if you aren’t a fan of leadership fables, you might think about skipping straight to page 162.

Read the full review here.

The needs of your employees change as your company matures. Members of the team that join when you’re in true startup mode know they are taking a risk. The company may not survive, but they are excited about being part of the journey. Everyone at a startup wears many hats. Being great at something is nice, but being really good at a lot of things is even better. These friends probably aren’t looking at your startup as a career, but rather as an adventure that will stretch them in exciting ways.

When you grow beyond the startup phase, all of that changes. People expect that the company will survive and that they will continue to get a paycheck. Their ability to pay the rent and feed their families may be dependent on your leadership. Increasingly, they aren’t joining your company to be part of a general team, but rather to do a specific job, and they expect to grow in that job as they build a career, with your company being at least the next step on that career path.

In a recent article on leadership and human resources, I outlined three key dimensions of leadership: how you lead, what people need from your leadership, and why leadership matters. In the article linked below, I share how those factors change as your company matures from pure startup to a scaling enterprise. I also look at Southwind, a growing home services company as an example.

Read the full story here.

Having lots of top priorities is like not having any top priorities at all, but sometimes prioritization is hard. I’ve developed a simple web-based tool I call the “prioritization eye test” based on the “priority scale” featured in Myron Rush’s classic book Management: A Biblical Approach.

You can read my article about the tool here,

Or try it out here.

I first read Management: A Biblical Approach in 1994. I was a software engineer becoming an entrepreneur and one of my co-founders, Gordon Martin, recommended that the startup’s three founders read the book together to set the foundation for the business we would launch. That was an excellent idea, one I’m still grateful for today.

Management: A Biblical Approach works through several disciplines involved in managing an organization. As the title explains, author Myron Rush provides wisdom from the Bible in pursuing these disciplines. But he doesn’t merely “paint” the conventional view of each discipline with a “biblical veneer”. Rather he builds each discipline up from a Biblical foundation, explaining how those seeking to be faithful to God’s revealed will can approach each discipline. Not surprisingly, he bases much of his teaching on scripture, but he also provides plenty of real world examples from his work with clients, his own working experience, and his own personal relationships.

While Management: A Biblical Approach is a great book for any Christian in management, it would make a particularly good gift for a believer moving into his first management role, or a manager who has newly come to faith and is seeking to understand how the Bible applies to all of life.

Read the full review here.