The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health.

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.

any organization that really wants to maximize its success must come to embody two basic qualities: it must be smart, and it must be healthy.

A 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.

Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the 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 health.

An organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time. That’s because people in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes.

good way to look at organizational health—and one that executives seem to respond to readily—is to see it as the multiplier of intelligence. The healthier an organization is, the more of its intelligence it is able to tap into and use.

DISCIPLINE 1: BUILD A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM

DISCIPLINE 2: CREATE CLARITY

DISCIPLINE 3: OVERCOMMUNICATE CLARITY

DISCIPLINE 4: REINFORCE CLARITY

few groups of leaders actually work like a team, at least not the kind that is required to lead a healthy organization. Most of them resemble what Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, authors of the book, The Wisdom of Teams, call a “working group.”

good way to understand a working group is to think of it like a golf team, where players go off and play on their own and then get together and add up their scores at the end of the day. A real team is more like a basketball team, one that plays together simultaneously, in an interactive, mutually dependent, and often interchangeable way.

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

When it comes to discussions and decision making, there are two critical ways that members of effective teams must communicate: advocacy and inquiry.

Advocacy is the kind of communication that most people are accustomed to, and it is all about stating your case or making your point.

Inquiry is rarer and more important than advocacy. It happens when people ask questions to seek clarity about another person’s statement of advocacy.

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.”

willingness of people to abandon their pride and their fear, to sacrifice their egos for the collective good of the team.

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,

At the heart of the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.

this kind of misattribution, where we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt but assume the worst about others, breaks down trust on a team.

help team members understand one another on a fundamental level and to give them as much information as possible about who a person is and why this person might act the way he or she does.

we must seek to understand more than to be understood.

Trust is just one of five behaviors that cohesive teams must establish to build a healthy organization. However, it is by far the most important of the five because it is the foundation for the others.

Contrary to popular wisdom and behavior, conflict is not a bad thing for a team.

productive ideological conflict, the willingness to disagree, even passionately when necessary, around important issues and decisions that must be made. But this can only happen when there is trust.

When team members trust one another, when they know that everyone on the team is capable of admitting when they don’t have the right answer, and when they’re willing to acknowledge when someone else’s idea is better than theirs, the fear of conflict and the discomfort it entails is greatly diminished.

Conflict without trust, however, is politics, an attempt to manipulate others in order to win an argument regardless of the truth.

there will always be a certain level of discomfort associated with disagreement. But it will be a healthy discomfort, a sign that there is productive tension around an issue that warrants discussion and debate.

What’s not okay is for team members to avoid disagreement, hold back their opinions on important matters, and choose their battles carefully based on the likely cost of disagreement.

Conflict Continuum

At one end of that continuum is no conflict at all. I call this artificial harmony, because it is marked by a lot of false smiling and disingenuous agreement around just about everything, at least publicly.

At the other end of the continuum is relentless, nasty, and destructive conflict, with people constantly at one another’s throats.

the point where a team is engaged in all the constructive conflict they could possibly have, but never stepping over the line into destructive territory.

must be willing to live through the messiness of recovering from slightly inappropriate conflict, so that they will have the courage to go back to the best place again and again.

this will never happen if executives are clinging to the side at the shallow end of the pool in the world of artificial harmony.

misguided idea that they cannot be frustrated or disagreeable with one another. What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.

mining for conflict

mining for conflict might seem like stirring the pot and looking for trouble. But it is quite the opposite. By looking for and exposing potential and even subtle disagreements that have not come to the surface, team leaders—and, heck, team members can do it too—avoid the destructive hallway conversations that inevitably result when people are reluctant to engage in direct, productive debate.

The reason that conflict is so important is that a team cannot achieve commitment without it. 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.

“If people don’t weigh in, they can’t buy in.”

when there has been no conflict, when different opinions have not been aired and debated, it becomes virtually impossible for team members to commit to a decision, at least not actively.

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

When team members know that their colleagues are truly committed to something, they can confront one another about issues without fearing defensiveness or backlash.

To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies.

The reason that behavioral accountability is more important than the quantitative, results-related kind has nothing to do with the fact that it is harder. It is due to the fact that behavioral problems almost always precede—and cause—a downturn in performance and results.

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.

The second requirement for building a healthy organization—creating clarity—is all about achieving alignment.