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there is nothing noble about withholding information that can help an employee improve.
That is indeed one form of accountability, but it’s not the most important kind.
The kind that is more fundamental, important, and difficult is about behavior.
Confronting someone about their behavior is a different matter. It involves a judgment call that is more likely to provoke a defensive response.
Conflict is about issues and ideas, while accountability is about performance and behavior.
holding one another accountable is a survivable and productive activity, and it will make them likely to continue doing it going forward.
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 only measure of a great team—or a great organization—is whether it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish.
When members of a leadership team feel a stronger sense of commitment and loyalty to the team they lead than the one they’re a member of, then the team they’re a member of
it’s just a place where people come together to lobby for their constituents.
The leadership team is constantly managing against a long list of eclectic goals, some of which may not be compatible and most of which pertain to only a few members of the team.
Within the context of making an organization healthy, alignment is about creating so much clarity that there is as little room as possible for confusion, disorder, and infighting to set
just a little daylight between members of a leadership team becomes blinding and overwhelming to employees one or two levels below.
They certainly haven’t created alignment and clarity among employees. What they have done is make many leadership teams look foolish.
SIX CRITICAL QUESTIONS What leaders must do to give employees the clarity they need is agree on the answers to six simple but critical questions and thereby eliminate even small discrepancies in their thinking. None of these questions is novel per se. What is new is the realization that none of them can be addressed in isolation; they must be answered together. Failing to achieve alignment around any one of them can prevent an organization from attaining the level of clarity necessary to become healthy. These are the six questions: 1. Why do we exist? 2. How do we behave? 3. What do we do? 4.
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Ashamed to say that i dont think ive done this to an adequate level.
answering these questions requires time. Not months, but certainly a few days up front followed by a little more time in the following weeks to fully bake the answers.
rally around the best answer they could find at the time.
Plenty of euphemisms attest to this idea that implementation science is more important than decision science. One I heard years ago comes from the military: a plan is better than no plan. And it was General Patton who once said, “A good plan violently executed today is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
waiting for clear confirmation that a decision is exactly right is a recipe for mediocrity and almost a guarantee of eventual failure.
organizations learn by making decisions, even bad ones.
decisive, leaders allow themselves to get clear, immediate data...
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indecisive competitors who, while congratulating themselves for not making a mistake, are too mired in theoretical analysis paral...
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An organization’s core purpose—why it exists—has to be completely idealistic.
And at the heart of that interaction is the expectation of a better life.
doesn’t mean that they make all people’s lives better; usually it’s a relatively small subset of the population.
an organization’s reason for existence, its purpose, has to be true.
process of determining an organization’s purpose cannot be confused with marketing, external or internal.
It must be all about clarity and alignment.
starts by asking this question: “How do we contribute to a better world?” Again, skeptics who think this sounds soft or ethereal need to remember that this is not the end of the clarity process and that it is critical to create a framework for more tactical decisions.
Why? Why do we do that? Why do we help companies use technology to do more business with their partners? Why do we pave driveways? Why do we teach kids how to do their homework better?
the purpose for identifying it is only to clarify what is true in order to guide the business.
provide employees with clarity about how to behave, which reduces the need for inefficient and demoralizing micromanagement.
The mistake those leaders made was trying to be all things to all people, which led them to make their values statements as broad and inclusive as possible. In
they try to accommodate all of the input they receive. Let me be very clear: this is a terrible process for identifying core values, for reasons
terrible way to build a strategy too
there are different kinds of values (something
Permission-to-Play Values
The Boy Scouts Scout Law (12 tenets - trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful , thrifty, brave, clean, reverent)
The Army Values (7 tenets - Loyalty Duty Respect Selfless Service Honor Integrity Personal Courage) are things that set their members apart, and I think does differentiate them.
guard against accidental values taking root because they can prevent new ideas and people from flourishing in an organization.
once a name or a term has been chosen, it will be important for the leadership team to define that term with the most vivid and behavioral description possible. And the best way to do that is to write a description of what that value looks like in action.
none of this matters if the values that an organization adopts are not real ones.
identify the employees in the organization who already embody what is best about the company and to dissect them, answering what is true about those people that makes them so admired by the leadership team. Those qualities form the initial pool of potential core values.
identify employees who, though talented, were or are no longer a good fit for the organization. These are people who, in spite of their technical abilities, drive others around them crazy and would add value to the organization by being absent.
It is the opposite of those annoying traits that provide yet another set of potential candidates for core values.
Finally, leaders need to be honest about themselves and whether or not they embody the values in that pool.
I had to ask them to take the third step and ensure that their suggested core values, including friendliness, applied to them too.
At the same time, the executives agreed that they needed to work on becoming more approachable and friendly, because it was something that many others in the organization valued. It would become an aspirational, but certainly not a core, value.
its business definition answers the question, What? It’s critical that it be clear and straightforward.
Again, no adverbs or qualifiers, and no unnecessarily detailed descriptions of sales channels or pricing. That kind of information comes in the next section, when we get into strategy.
an organization’s business definition can change over time,
our core values and reason for existing have never changed.
an organization’s strategy is simply its plan for success.
