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January 1, 2016 - November 23, 2017
many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health (which I’ll be defining shortly) because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it.
it doesn’t require great intelligence or sophistication, just uncommon levels of discipline, courage, persistence, and common sense.
The Adrenaline Bias:
many of the leaders I’ve worked with suffer from a chronic case of adrenaline addiction, seemingly hooked on the daily rush of activity and firefighting within their organizations.
you have to slow down in order to go fast.
The Quantification Bias:
it just requires a level of conviction and intuition that many overly analytical leaders have a hard time accepting.
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.
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.
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. That’s because people in a healthy organization, beginning with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes.
Healthy families—the ones where parents give their children discipline, affection, and time—almost always improve over the years, even when they lack many of the advantages and resources that money can buy.
key ingredient for improvement and success is not access to knowledge or resources,
They fail to see that the real deficiency, the one that makes it possible for smart people to make dumb decisions, is a lack of organizational health.
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
When it comes to reinforcing clarity, there is no such thing as too much communication.
DISCIPLINE 4: REINFORCE CLARITY
Every policy, every program, every activity should be designed to remind employees what is really most important.
What kind of advantage would the first organization have over the second, and how much time and energy would it be worth investing to make this advantage a reality?
If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance that it will become healthy.
Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which provides detailed instructions for how to implement many of the exercises and tools we use
Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, authors of the book, The Wisdom of Teams, call a “working group.”2
Becoming a real team requires an intentional decision on the part of its members. I like to say that 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.
Advocacy is the kind of communication that most people are accustomed to, and it is all
Inquiry is rarer and more important than advocacy. It happens when people ask questions to seek clarity about another person’s statement of advocacy.
Collective responsibility implies, more than anything else, selflessness and shared sacrifices from team members.
leadership team members must see their goals as collective and shared when it comes to managing the top priorities of the greater organization.
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.”
At the heart of vulnerability lies the willingness of people to abandon their pride and their fear, to sacrifice their egos for the collective good of the team.
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.
we must seek to understand more than to be understood.
BEHAVIOR 2: MASTERING CONFLICT
Overcoming the tendency to run from discomfort is one of the most important requirements for any leadership team—in
People who work in those organizations tend to have a misguided idea that they cannot be frustrated or disagreeable with one another. What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.
When leadership team members fail to disagree around issues, not only are they increasing the likelihood of losing respect for one another and encountering destructive conflict later when people start griping in the hallways, they’re also making bad decisions and letting down the people they’re supposed to be serving. And they do this all in the name of being “nice.”
BEHAVIOR 3: ACHIEVING
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.
it should not be misinterpreted as an argument for consensus.
At the end of every meeting, cohesive teams must take a few minutes to ensure that everyone sitting at the table is walking away with the same understanding about what has been agreed to and what they are committed to do.
It’s only when people know that their peers have completely bought in to a decision that they will have the courage to embrace the fourth and most difficult behavior of a cohesive team: accountability.
BEHAVIOR 4: EMBRACING ACCOUNTABILITY
peer-to-peer accountability is the primary and most effective source of accountability on the leadership team of a healthy organization.
the more comfortable a leader is holding people on a team accountable, the less likely she is to be asked to do so. The less likely she is to confront people, the more she’ll be called on to do it by subordinates who aren’t willing to do her dirty work for her.
To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies.
