Back in 1997, a group of colleagues and I started our management consulting firm, The Table Group. Because we had worked together in a department I led in a previous company, we had an easy time agreeing on our core values: humble, hungry, and smart. These were the principles that guided our department previously, and we wanted to maintain them in our new firm. So we committed to hiring only people who embodied these concepts and to avoid making any operational or strategic decisions that violated them.

In the consulting work we did with clients, we not only helped leaders build better teams, but we also assisted them in clarifying everything from their strategies, tactics, roles, responsibilities, meetings, and, most important for this conversation, values. In the course of discussing values, clients would inevitably ask us about ours at The Table Group.

Now, we didn't publicize humble, hungry, and smart. They were nowhere to be found on our website or in any of our collateral. We felt that as long as we understood and stayed true to them, no one else really needed to understand them. However, when clients asked us, we felt compelled to share them. And when we explained humble, hungry, and smart, something strange would often happen: clients would declare that they were going to adopt those values, too.

Of course, we would immediately protest and explain that an organization's values can't be copied or borrowed; they need to be true reflections of the unique history and culture of that organization. We often attributed our clients' interest in our values to expediency, or perhaps even ­laziness—their desire to grab the first set of positive-sounding words, so that they could declare their search for values over. Well, we eventually discovered we were wrong about their motivation and that there was a logical explanation why our clients wanted to adopt humble, hungry, and smart.

First, our firm's culture was all about teamwork, both in what we did with clients and in how we tried to behave internally, because we had always vowed to practice what we preached. Second, virtually all the companies that engaged our firm were already interested in teamwork, which makes sense given that we were best known for the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. So, it shouldn't have been terribly surprising to think that our hiring criteria and core values would make up the very definition of a team player, even if we didn't realize it at the time.

Once we made this realization, we started to look at the relevance of humble, hungry, and smart for other organizations in a different way. Those words weren't necessarily core values, but they were critical hiring and development criteria for any organization that wanted teamwork to be central to its operations.

To make sure we weren't deluding ourselves, we asked the question, Could a person fully practice the five behaviors at the heart of teamwork (see the model on page 214) if he or she didn't buy into the idea of being humble, hungry, and smart?

The answer was a resounding no.

A person who is not humble will not be able to be vulnerable and build trust, making them unable to engage in honest conflict and hold others accountable. And they'll have a hard time committing to decisions that don't serve their interests. A colleague who lacks hunger will not be willing to engage in uncomfortable conflict, hold peers accountable for their behaviors, or do whatever it takes to achieve results, choosing instead to take an easier path. And a person who is not smart about people will most likely create unnecessary problems in the entire teambuilding process, especially when it comes to tactfully engaging in productive conflict and holding people accountable for behaviors.

After reviewing, discussing, and using the model in our own firm and seeing our clients try to adopt it in theirs, we became convinced that any leader who wants to make teamwork a reality should find and/or develop people who are humble, hungry, and smart. To do all of this, leaders need to understand how these qualities work together and what happens when one or more of them are missing.