Shaping a Winning Team
A Leader's Guide to Hiring, Assessing, and Developing the People You Need to Succeed
The clear, concise leadership guide Shaping a Winning Team uses rowing metaphors to define and explore the key traits of effective workers and leaders.
Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam’s human resources and management guide Shaping a Winning Team concerns hiring, training, and assessing strong employees.
Drawing upon data from a period of twenty-five years, the book outlines which personality traits it says successful managers have and unsuccessful managers lack. And it models positive leadership principles to improve productivity and decrease turnover: here, a positive leader is someone who is “guided by possibility” and accepts the responsibility of protecting others “from the adverse effects of drillers.” Its model uses rowers, drillers, and sitters as archetypes: rowers are successful and benevolent authorities who lift up the group, drillers are the rowers’ manipulative and selfish opposites who sink teams, and the sitters are in between and blend in. Likewise, rowboats become metaphor for company teams: stability depends on everyone in the boat, which needs forward motion for meaning. These central images are defined, compared, and contrasted with clarity, and the distinctions between them are reiterated in multiple chapters after they are introduced for easy reference.
The book’s tone is encouraging but firm, asserting that “while the world may need all kinds of people, businesses don’t.” But its central conceit is too often strained, as when it asks whether drillers can become rowers or sitters and provides the vague response that “the answer lies in the genetic composition of drillers … who tend to have large egos” without explaining this generalization. And it dilutes its focus with the inclusion of a fairy tale about a fanatical donkey and a logical lion that is made applicable to organizations that don’t recognize their current struggles and work to better themselves.
Further, while the book draws upon the findings of renowned researchers and educators to back up its ideas of proper and improper corporate ecosystems, it also quotes less credibility-building individuals, such as a man who was arrested for various crimes and who put forth philosophies that were denounced as outlandish. Still, the book’s progression is steady, and its ideas are reinforced well throughout. Helpful tools are introduced, as with six key positive leader indexes and indexes related to changing mindsets and relationship development.
Born from collaborative brainstorming sessions, the leadership guide Shaping a Winning Team defines the key traits of effective workers and leaders.
Reviewed by
Stephanie Marrie
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
