Mark Murphy: The Five Critical Roles You Need to Build a Winning Team - Roundtable

With two senior HR Practitioners and a CEO, I had real expertise  for this particular roundtable discussion of the Mark Murphy podcast discussing his book ‘Team Players: The Five Critical Roles You Need to Build Winning Team’.  We dug deep into the concept of Psychological Safety and how this allows for a diversity of roles, for robust discussion, for curiosity and tough questions and for creative outcomes. This led to a discussion of how to apply the idea of the 5 roles in decisions for hiring - and how  to talk with teams and those on interview panels well before new hires about what roles they actually need. This was to avoid the ‘hiring like me’ tendency to clone oneself in hiring decisions. Comparative advantage was seen as a crucial concept for legacy and succession, with founders/CEOs etc needing to hand over key functions and bring people through well before they themselves are due to leave. Another deep conversation was around setting objectives and key results, and the discussion landed on the need to frame these in terms of peoples’ natural role types.