The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

Permission-to-Play Values These values are the minimum behavioral standards that are required in an organization. Although they are extremely important, permission-to-play values don’t serve to clearly define or differentiate an organization from others.

The problem for organizations that choose common words like innovation or quality is that everyone has their own understanding of those terms. That makes it a little more difficult for leaders to establish their own definition.

Once an organization successfully identifies and describes its core values and separates them from the other kinds, it must then do its best to be intolerant of violations of those values. It must ensure that every activity it undertakes, every employee it hires, and every policy it enacts reflects those core values.

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If an organization’s reason for existence answers the question, Why?, then its business definition answers the question, What? It’s critical that it be clear and straightforward.

If we accomplish only one thing during the next x months, what would it be? In other words, What must be true x months from now for us to be able to look back and say with any credibility that we had a good period?

Remember, the purpose of having a thematic goal is not to restrict the organization’s flexibility but rather to rally its leaders around what they decide they want to achieve.

In most cases, the answers to the six questions can be captured on a single page—two at the most.

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leadership team members should keep their playbook with them at all times. And not buried in a briefcase. They should keep it on their desks, bring it to staff meetings, and have it available for

quick reference and as a tool for communicating to employees.

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The point of leadership is not to keep the leader entertained, but to mobilize people around what is most important.

Hiring without clear and strict criteria for cultural fit greatly hampers the potential for success of any organization.

the single most important reason to reward people is to provide them with an incentive for doing what is best for the organization.

To fail to make the connection between compensation and rewards and one or more of the six big questions is to waste one of the best opportunities for motivation and management.

What leaders need to understand is that the vast majority of employees, at all levels of an organization, see financial rewards as a satisfier, not a driver. That means they want to receive enough compensation to make them feel good about their job, but additional money doesn’t yield proportionate increases in their job satisfaction. And

gratitude, recognition, increased responsibilities, and other forms of genuine appreciation are drivers.

Keeping a relatively strong performer who is not a cultural fit creates a variety of problems. Most important of all, it sends a loud and clear message to employees that the organization isn’t all that serious about what it says it believes. Tolerating behavior that flies in the face of core values inspires cynicism and becomes almost impossible to reverse over time. When leaders take the difficult step of letting a strong performer go because of a values mismatch, they not only send a powerful message about their commitment to their values, they also usually find that the performance of the remaining employees improves because they are no longer being stifled by the behavior of their former colleague.