Shaping a Winning Team: A Leader’s Guide to Hiring, Assessing, and Developing the People You Need to Succeed
Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam
Amplify Publishing (August 2024)

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” African Proverb

With rare exception, athletic teams that have both great talent and great teamwork outperform others that have only one or the other but not both. A rowing crew, for example.

The same is true of companies, whatever their size and nature may be. It is no coincidence that companies annually ranked among those that are most highly admired and best to work for are also annually ranked among those that are most profitable, with the greatest cap value in their industry segment. However different they may be in most other respects, all of them have positive leadership at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. They have a workplace culture within which personal growth and professional development are most likely to thrive.

Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam wrote  Shaping a Winning Team in order to explain HOW to create such a workplace. As they explain, “This book is designed to understand why specific individuals can become successful leaders and workers and how they can be effective through positive leadership. And through positive leadership, it is essential to identify and understand the influence of rowers, sitters, and drillers at work and in their lives.”

Rowers “are individuals with a high level of comfort in exhibiting the key personality traits that produce outcomes as leaders or workers. In sharp contrast, drifters create an atmosphere of negative energy. They drain the significance of the workforce by complaining, back-channeling, and degrading others. These individuals tend to have egotistical and even narcissistic attributes. They are the opposite of rowers. Fayad and Lam call them drillers. Sitters are located between both groups. They do not achieve the highest level of the personality traits that produce rowers — nor do they create as many problems as do drillers.  These distinctions should guide and inform recruiting, interviewing hiring, onboarding, and developing both leaders and followers who are essential to organizational success.

These are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the nature and scope of  Fayad and  Lam’s coverage:

o Preface (Pages xiii-xvii)
o How It All Began ((1-8)
o Rowers, Sitters, and Drillers in the Workplace (12-18)
o The Eighty-Twenty Rulwe (20-23)
o Exceptions to the Rowers, Sitters, and Drillers Categorization (27-28)

o How OfrganiΩational Behavior Impactsz the Workforce  (46-49)
o Where Does It All Begin? (52-57)
o The Power of Negativity (65-73)
o The Rise of Effective Communication in Success (84-87)
o Emotional Intelligence in Leadership (91-92 and 92-95)

o The ABCs of Relationships (105-116)
o Creating the Path of Organizational Timeline (121-123)
o Leadership (126-130)
o Employee Engagement (130-133)
o Process-Centric  Operation (133-136)

o Implementing Change (149-156)
o Developing Conasisztent Performance (157-167)
o Epilogue (169-171)
o Afterword (173-181)
o Appendix: The Positive Assessment Tool℠ Reviewed (183-195)

As I asserted earlier, with rare exception, athletic teams that have both great talent and great teamwork outperform others that have only one or the other but not both. That is also true of non-athletic organizations that include businesses as well as governmental entities at local state, and national levels. In Shaping a Winning Team, Paul Fayad and Chak Fu Lam provided an abundance of information, insights, and counsel that can help leaders of almost any organization (whatever its size and nature may be) to recruit, assess, hire, onboard, and develop the “rowers” they need to achieve success while avoiding for eliminating “drillers.”

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading Shaping a Winning Team: First, highlight key passages Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and whatever you have learned that will be most helpful. Pay special attention to the material in Appendix A: The Positive Assessment Tool℠ Reviewed.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite your frequent reviews of key material later.