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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.
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.
organizational health is certainly fraught with the potential for subjective and awkward conversations.
organizations today have more than enough intelligence, expertise, and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.
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.
When leaders of an organization are less than honest with one another, when they put the needs of their departments or their careers ahead of the needs of the greater organization, when they are misaligned, confused, and inconsistent about what is important, they create real anguish for real human beings.
behaviorally cohesive in five fundamental ways.
intellectually aligned and committed to the same answers to six simple but critical questions.
communicate those answers to employees clearly, repeatedly, enthusiastically, and repeatedly
there is no such thing as too much communication.
establish a few critical, nonbureaucratic systems to reinforce clarity in every process that involves people.
a real team requires an intentional decision on the part of its members.
A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.
A leadership team should be made up of somewhere between three and twelve people, though anything over eight or nine is usually problematic.
advocacy and inquiry.
The same is true in large committees or on task forces within organizations, where people rarely take the opportunity to probe for understanding and clarity, but instead merely pile opinion upon opinion. This inevitably leads to misunderstanding and poor decision making.
Why do so many organizations still have too many people on their leadership teams? Often it’s because they want to be “inclusive,” a politically correct way of saying they want to portray themselves as welcoming input from as many people as possible.
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. If someone is unhappy with his pay or status
Collective responsibility implies, more than anything else, selflessness and shared sacrifices from team members.
Members of cohesive teams spend many hours working together on issues and topics that often don’t fall directly within their formal areas of responsibility. They go to meetings to help their team members solve problems even when those problems have nothing to do with their departments. And perhaps most challenging of all, they enter into difficult, uncomfortable discussions, even bringing up thorny issues with colleagues about their shortcomings, in order to solve problems that might prevent the team from achieving its objectives. They do this even when they’re tempted to avoid it all and go
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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.
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.”
Or as the prayer of St. Francis goes, we must seek to understand more than to be understood.
But the problem, in fact, would be a lack of competence rather than too much vulnerability.
Conflict without trust, however, is politics, an attempt to manipulate others in order to win an argument regardless of the truth.
more than one way to engage in healthy conflict. 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.
What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.
LOL. I make this distinction all the time and folks look at me like I'm nuts.
When leadership teams wait for consensus before taking action, they usually end up with decisions that are made too late and are mildly disagreeable to everyone.
calls “disagree and commit.”
leave the room unambiguously committed to a common course of action.
requires a willingness on the part of the leader to invite the discomfort of conflict.
Most people are generally reasonable and can rally around an idea that wasn’t their own as long as they know they’ve had a chance to weigh in.
procedural justice
They then go back to their offices and do as little as possible to support that idea.
malicious compliance
Forget about the financial cost of people continuing to fly business class. It pales in comparison to the loss in credibility that executives encountered and the internal politics that they created because they failed to achieve real, active commitment around a decision.
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. Unfortunately, people are usually eager to leave the room when a meeting is coming to a close, and so they are more than susceptible to tolerating a little ambiguity. That’s why functional teams maintain the discipline to review their commitments and stick around long enough
the only thing more painful than taking additional time to get clarity and commitment is going out into the organization with a confusing and misaligned message.
they modeled vulnerability by acknowledging the dysfunction of what had happened before
Peer Pressure Notice that I’m focused here on peers. That’s because peer-to-peer accountability is the primary and most effective source of accountability on the leadership team of a healthy organization.
led them through an accountability exercise that calls for team members to confront one another about each other’s behaviors.
“Watch out for your self-righteous attitude. It shuts down our brainstorming.”
I worry about this sometimes. . Not that I am, but that when I'm impatient about something that I just run thru/over everyone.
The leader of the team, though not the primary source of accountability, will always be the ultimate arbiter of it.
here is the irony—the more comfortable a leader is holding people on a team accountable, the less likely she is to be asked to do
Firing someone is not necessarily a sign of accountability, but is often the last act of cowardice for a leader who doesn’t know how or isn’t willing to hold people accountable.
dad always took pride in turning around a unit or person and never in chaptering them out.
To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies.
failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness.
