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The health of an organization provides the context for strategy, finance, marketing, technology, and everything else that happens within it, which is why it is the single greatest factor determining an organization’s success.
The Sophistication Bias: Organizational health is so simple and accessible that many leaders have a hard time seeing it as a real opportunity for meaningful advantage. After all, it doesn’t require great intelligence or sophistication, just uncommon levels of discipline, courage, persistence, and common sense. In an age where we have come to believe that differentiation and dramatic improvement can be found only in complexity, it’s hard for well-educated executives to embrace something so simple and straightforward.
The Adrenaline Bias: Becoming a healthy organization takes a little time. Unfortunately, many of the leaders I’ve worked with suffer from a chronic case of adrenaline addiction, seemingly hooked on the daily rush of activity and firefighting within their organizations.
it remains a serious obstacle for many dysfunctional organizations led by executives who don’t understand that old race-car drivers’ axiom: you have to slow down in order to go fast.
An organization has integrity—is healthy—when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.
Smart organizations are good at those classic fundamentals of business—subjects like strategy, marketing, finance, and technology—which I consider to be decision sciences.
good way to recognize health is to look for the signs that indicate an organization has it. These include minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees. Two Requirements for Success
light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational
their teams of senior executives, I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.
In almost every situation, it was politics, behavioral misalignment, and inconsistency that did them in, leading them to make what seemed in retrospect like obvious tactical and strategic mistakes.
When leaders of an organization are less than honest with one another, when they put the needs of their departments or their careers ahead of the needs of the greater organization, when they are misaligned, confused, and inconsistent about what is important, they create real anguish for real human beings. And they experience that anguish themselves too.
Is this model foolproof? Pretty much. When an organization’s leaders are cohesive, when they are unambiguously aligned around a common set of answers to a few critical questions, when they communicate those answers again and again and again, and when they put effective processes in place to reinforce those answers, they create an environment in which success is almost impossible to prevent. Really.
It’s kind of like a family. If the parents’ relationship is dysfunctional, the family will be too.
A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.
What does this have to do with the size of a team? Plenty. When more than eight or nine people are on a team, members tend to advocate a heck of a lot more than they inquire. This makes sense because they aren’t confident that they’re going to get the opportunity to speak again soon, so they use their scarce floor time to announce their position or make a point. When a team is small, members are more likely to use much of their time asking questions and seeking clarity, confident that they’ll be able to regain the floor and share their ideas or opinions when necessary.
Inclusivity, or the basic idea behind it, should be achieved by ensuring that the members of a leadership team are adequately representing and tapping into the opinions of the people who work for them, not by maximizing the size of the team.
Another reason that leadership teams are often too large is the lack of wisdom and courage on the part of the executives in charge who put people on their teams as a reward or as an enticement to join the company. I can’t give Bill a raise or a promotion, but I think he’ll be happy if I make him part of the executive team. Or maybe, If you come to work for my company, I’ll have you report directly to me. These are bad reasons to add staff to a leadership team. The Noah’s Ark Management
The only reason that a person should be on a team is that she represents a key part of the organization or brings truly critical talent or insight to the table.
Collective responsibility implies, more than anything else, selflessness and shared sacrifices from team members.
Members of cohesive teams spend many hours working together on issues and topics that often don’t fall directly within their formal areas of responsibility. They go to meetings to help their team members solve problems even when those problems have nothing to do with their departments. And perhaps most challenging of all, they enter into difficult, uncomfortable discussions, even bringing up thorny issues with colleagues about their shortcomings, in order to solve problems that might prevent the team from achieving its objectives.
Though this is pretty straightforward, it’s worth stating that most of a leadership team’s objectives should be collective ones.
While truly vulnerable team members eventually have to get comfortable revealing who they are, they need to start in a nonthreatening way. That’s why, during an off-site session, we take teams through a quick exercise where we ask them to tell everyone, briefly, a few things about their lives. In particular, we have them say where they were born, how many siblings they have, where they fall in the order of children, and finally, what the most interesting or difficult challenge was for them as a kid.
