Team Players - by Mark Murphy (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The New York Times-bestselling author of Hundred Percenters and Hiring for Attitude shows you how to build the most successful team

The conventional wisdom is wrong about how great teams are built. Effective leaders worry less about cohesion and more about assembling the right group of people with complementary talents and personalities. No amount of teambuilding, trust, or cohesion can overcome having the wrong mix of people in the room.

In Team Players, Mark Murphy argues that the best teams contain an ideal mix of five vital roles: Director, Achiever, Stabilizer, Harmonizer, and Trailblazer. Murphy's groundbreaking research shows how to unlock each team member's talents and position them to succeed within the team.

Murphy reveals how unlocking the Directors, Achievers, Stabilizers, Harmonizers, and Trailblazers on your team solves teams' absence of accountability, the torment of aimless meetings, the unfairness of uneven workloads, the scarcity of active participation, the chaos of clashing agendas, and the dearth of decisiveness.

With a balance of hard-hitting research and compelling real-world examples, this book is a pivotal read for anyone keen on accelerating team development while allowing individual brilliance to shine through.

Review Quotes

"Team Players is an important book that shows us a team needs more than just strong leaders--it needs the right mix of five roles and talents to succeed. Mark Murphy helps leaders discover their style and the complementary roles they need to build winning and successful teams."
--Ken Hicks, president and CEO, PetSmart

"Mark Murphy's Team Players is a must-read for everyone who needs to make things happen with a team or group. After 35 years as a CEO, I've always believed in the power of teamwork--but had I possessed Murphy's research and insights earlier in my career, I know I would have built even more effective and successful teams."
--Robert Rosenberg, retired CEO, Dunkin' Donuts; author of Around the Corner to Around the World

"No one has more experience with teams than Mark Murphy. His five-player team model allows you to quickly diagnose when and why a team is failing and provides actionable advice for successfully leading teams. This is incredibly well-written, and I couldn't stop reading!"
--Keith Sawyer, author of Group Genius

About the Author

Mark Murphy is the the author of the New York Times bestseller Hundred Percenters, Senior Contributor to Forbes, and Founder of Leadership IQ, a research and training firm. His research has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Time, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He is also the author of Hiring for Attitude. He lives in Roswell, Georgia.