The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it.

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. More than talent. More than knowledge. More than innovation.

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.

These include minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees.

Two Requirements for Success

The Four Disciplines Model

Like building a strong marriage or family, it’s a messy process that involves doing a few things at once, and it must be maintained on an ongoing basis in order to be preserved.

Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, authors of the book, The Wisdom of Teams, call a “working group.”2

The kind of trust that is necessary to build a great team is what I call vulnerability-based trust. This is what happens when members get to a point where they are completely comfortable being transparent, honest, and naked with one another, where they say and genuinely mean things like “I screwed up,” “I need help,” “Your idea is better than mine,” “I wish I could learn to do that as well as you do,” and even, “I’m sorry.”

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. Again, we’re not interested in their inner childhoods, just what was uniquely challenging for them growing up.

Team Effectiveness Exercise A good tool for teams that want to improve their ability to hold one another accountable is something we call the team effectiveness exercise.

We start the exercise by having everyone write down one thing that each of the other team members does that makes the team better. In other words, they write down, for everyone other than themselves, the single biggest area of strength as it pertains to the impact on the group. We’re interested not in their technical skills, but in the way they behave when the team is together that makes the team stronger.

Then we ask them to do the same thing, except this time focusing on the one aspect of each person that sometimes hurts the team. After ten or fifteen minutes of thoughtful consideration and note taking, everyone is usually done. Then, starting with the leader, we go around the room asking everyone to report on the leader’s one positive characteristic. We then allow the leader to provide his general, one-sentence reaction. In most cases, the leader is quite humbled by the positive feedback, sometimes even surprised by it. Then we go around the room again, asking people to report on the one characteristic that the leader needs to improve on. Again, we let the leader provide a brief reaction—not a rebuttal, but simply a reaction—to the feedback