Team Players: The Five Critical Roles You Need to Build a Winning Team -- Mark Murphy, Hardcover

A New York Times-bestselling author shows you how to build the most successful team

The conventional wisdom is wrong about how great teams are built. Great teams 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.


Author: Mark Murphy
Publisher: Basic Venture
Published: 10/07/2025
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
ISBN: 9781541705975

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.