The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

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.

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.

An organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time.

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.

The first step a leadership team has to take if it wants the organization it leads to be healthy—and to achieve the advantages that go with it—is to make itself cohesive. There’s just no way around it. If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance that it will become healthy.

A real team is more like a basketball team, one that plays together simultaneously, in an interactive, mutually dependent, and often interchangeable way.

teamwork is not a virtue. It is a choice—and a strategic one.

A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.

When more than eight or nine people are on a team, members tend to advocate a heck of a lot more than they inquire.

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.

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.

No one on a cohesive team can say, Well, I did my job. Our failure isn’t my fault.

When leaders preach teamwork but exclusively reward individual achievement, they are confusing their people and creating an obstacle to true team behavior.

When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer. It is not only okay but desirable.

Every endeavor of importance in life, whether it is creative, athletic, interpersonal, or academic, brings with it a measure of discomfort,

When leadership team members avoid discomfort among themselves, they only transfer it in far greater quantities to larger groups of people throughout the organization they’re supposed to be serving.

When someone comes to a meeting and states an opinion or makes a suggestion that his teammates don’t agree with, those teammates have a choice: they can explain their disagreement and work through it, or they can withhold their opinion and allow themselves to quietly lose respect for their colleague.

it’s important to remember that the reluctance to engage in conflict is not always a problem of conflict per se. In many cases, and perhaps in most of them, the real problem goes back to a lack of trust.

People will not actively commit to a decision if they have not had the opportunity to provide input, ask questions, and understand the rationale behind it. Another way to say this is, “If people don’t weigh in, they can’t buy in.”

the principle of disagree and commit can’t happen without the disagree part.

peer-to-peer accountability is the primary and most effective source of accountability on the leadership team of a healthy organization.

Too many leaders seem to have a greater affinity for and loyalty to the department they lead rather than the team they’re a member of and the organization they are supposed to be collectively serving.

there is no getting around the fact that the only measure of a great team—or a great organization—is whether it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish.

no matter how good a leadership team feels about itself, and how noble its mission might be, if the organization it leads rarely achieves its goals, then, by definition, it’s simply not a good team.

Great teams ensure that all members, in spite of their individual responsibilities and areas of expertise, are doing whatever they can to help the team accomplish its goals. That means they need to be asking difficult questions about what is happening in other departments and volunteering, in any way they can, to help those parts of the business that might be struggling and might jeopardize the success of the entire organization.

leaders underestimate the impact of even subtle misalignment at the top, and the damage caused to the rest of the organization by small gaps among members of the executive team.

There is probably no greater frustration for employees than having to constantly navigate the politics and confusion caused by leaders who are misaligned.

1. Why do we exist? 2. How do we behave? 3. What do we do? 4. How will we succeed? 5. What is most important, right now? 6. Who must do what?

waiting for clear confirmation that a decision is exactly right is a recipe for mediocrity and almost a guarantee of eventual failure.

organizations learn by making decisions, even bad ones.

the process of determining an organization’s purpose cannot be confused with marketing, external or internal. It must be all about clarity and alignment.

The point here is that an organization’s reason for existing is not meant to be a differentiator and that the purpose for identifying it is only to clarify what is true in order to guide the business. When leaders try to use their purpose as a strategic differentiator, they usually fail to fully tap into the real reason for having one, and then find themselves disappointed when they learn that another company, perhaps even within their industry, shares theirs.

if an organization is tolerant of everything, it will stand for nothing.

Core values lie at the heart of the organization’s identity, do not change over time, and must already exist.

Aspirational values are the qualities that an organization is aspiring to adopt and will do its best to manage intentionally into the organization. However, they are neither natural nor inherent, which is why they must be purposefully inserted into the culture.

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.

an organization’s strategy is simply its plan for success. It’s nothing more than the collection of intentional decisions a company makes to give itself the best chance to thrive and differentiate from competitors. That means every single decision, if it is made intentionally and consistently, will be part of the overall strategy.

Most organizations I’ve worked with have too many top priorities to achieve the level of focus they need to succeed.

every organization, if it wants to create a sense of alignment and focus, must have a single top priority within a given period of time.

the thematic goal is the answer to our question, What is most important, right now?

The best way to identify a thematic goal is to answer the question, 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?

On a cohesive team, leaders are not there simply to represent the departments that they lead and manage but rather to solve problems that stand in the way of achieving success for the whole organization.

too many leaders come to meetings with the unspoken assumption that they are there to lobby for and defend their constituents.

Defining objectives are the general categories of activity required to achieve the thematic goal.

standard operating objectives. These are the ongoing and relatively straightforward metrics and areas of responsibility that any leadership team must maintain in order to keep the organization afloat.

Whether the real number is five, seven, or seventy-seven, the point is that people are skeptical about what they’re being told unless they hear it consistently over time.

The only way for people to embrace a message is to hear it over a period of time, in a variety of different situations, and preferably from different people.

great leaders see themselves as Chief Reminding Officers as much as anything else. Their top two priorities are to set the direction of the organization and then to ensure that people are reminded of it on a regular basis.

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

Amazingly, when employees in different parts of an organization hear their leaders saying the same things after meetings, they actually start to believe that alignment and clarity might be possible.