The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

The best way to do cascading communication is face-to-face and live. Seeing a leader and hearing the tone of his or her voice is critical for employees, as is being able to ask a question or two.

Another good idea when doing cascading communication, whenever it’s possible, is to do it with an entire group of direct reports at the same time instead of one by one. Aside from being more efficient, it ensures that they hear the same message at the same time and benefit from one another’s questions and observations.

most organizations are unhealthy precisely because they aren’t doing the basic things, which require discipline, persistence, and follow-through more than sophistication or intelligence.

noncohesive leadership teams that have not aligned themselves around common answers to critical questions are not in a position to respond adequately to employee input and requests.

The most well-intentioned, well-designed departmental communication program will not tear down silos unless the people who created those silos want them torn down.

When leadership team members abdicate responsibility for this, they are often left with more generic, rote systems and processes than they wanted.

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

too much structure almost always interferes with a person’s ability to use their common sense,

it is far easier to add a little structure later to a fairly bare system than it is to deconstruct an already overcomplicated process.

when leaders fail to tell employees that they’re doing a great job, they might as well be taking money out of their pockets and throwing it into a fire, because they are wasting opportunities to give people the recognition they crave more than anything else.

Direct, personal feedback really is the simplest and most effective form of motivation.

almost no employees willingly leave an organization where they are getting the levels of gratitude and appreciation that they deserve just to make a little more money, unless, of course, they are so grossly underpaid that they can’t justify staying in the job for the sake of their livelihood.

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.

The most powerful impact of having teams meet every day is the quick resolution of minor issues that might otherwise fester and create unnecessary busywork for the team.

What leadership teams need to do—and this may be the single most important piece of advice for them when it comes to meetings—is separate their tactical conversations from their strategic ones.

the single biggest factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier—or not—is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the person in charge.

when an organization is healthy (when the leader at the top is doing his or her most important job), people find a way to get things done. When an organization is unhealthy, no amount of heroism or technical expertise is going to make up for the confusion and politics that take root.