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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.
before leaders can tap into the power of organizational health, they must humble themselves enough to overcome the three biases that prevent them from embracing it.
The Sophistication Bias: Organizational health is so simple and accessible that many leaders have a hard time seeing it as a real opportunity for meaningful advantage.
The Adrenaline Bias: Becoming a healthy organization takes a little time. Unfortunately, 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
The Quantification Bias: The benefits of becoming a healthy organization, as powerful as they are, are difficult to accurately quantify.
At its core, organizational health is about integrity, but not in the ethical or moral way that integrity is defined so often today. 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.
Smart organizations are good at those classic fundamentals of business—subjects like strategy, marketing, finance, and technology—which I consider to be decision sciences.
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.
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. Without politics and confusion getting in their way, they cycle through problems and rally around solutions much faster than their dysfunctional and political rivals do. Moreover, they create environments in which employees do the same.
The Four Disciplines Model
DISCIPLINE 1: BUILD A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM An organization simply cannot be healthy if the people who are chartered with running it are not behaviorally cohesive in five fundamental ways.
DISCIPLINE 2: CREATE CLARITY
the leadership team of a healthy organization must be intellectually aligned and committed to the same answers to six simple but critical questions.
DISCIPLINE 3: OVERCOMMUNICATE CLARITY
it must then communicate those answers to employees clearly, repeatedly, enthusiastically, and repeatedly (that’s not a typo). When it comes to reinforcing clarity, there is no such thing as too much communication.
DISCIPLINE 4: REINFORCE CLARITY
its leaders must establish a few critical, nonbureaucratic systems to reinforce clarity in every process that involves people. Every policy, every program, every activity should be designed to remind employees what is really most important.
DISCIPLINE 1
DEFINING A LEADERSHIP “TEAM”
The truth is, few groups of leaders actually work like a team,
Most of them resemble
a “working group.”2
A 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.
A Small Group of People
A leadership team should be made up of somewhere between three and twelve people, though anything over eight or nine is usually problematic.
Having too many people on a team can cause a variety of logistical challenges, but the primary problem has to do with communication.
Collectively Responsible
Collective responsibility implies, more than anything else, selflessness and shared sacrifices from team members.
Common Objectives
most of a leadership team’s objectives should be collective ones.
if a team shares a common objective, a good portion of their compensation or reward structure, though not necessarily all of it, should be based on the achievement of that common objective.
let’s focus on the steps for building a cohesive one. At the heart of the process lie five behavioral principles that every team must embrace:
BEHAVIOR 1: BUILDING TRUST
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.”
BEHAVIOR 2: MASTERING CONFLICT
Contrary to popular wisdom and behavior, conflict is not a bad thing for a team. In fact, the fear of conflict is almost always a sign of problems.
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.
BEHAVIOR 3: ACHIEVING COMMITMENT
The reason that conflict is so important is that a team cannot achieve commitment without it.
“If people don’t weigh in, they can’t buy in.”
BEHAVIOR 4: EMBRACING ACCOUNTABILITY
members of a team need to be held accountable if a team is going to stick to its decisions and accomplish its goals.
BEHAVIOR 5: FOCUSING ON RESULTS
The ultimate point of building greater trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability is one thing: the achievement of results.
one of the greatest challenges to team success is the inattention to 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.
CHECKLIST FOR DISCIPLINE 1: BUILD A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements: The leadership team is small enough (three to ten people) to be effective. Members of the team trust one another and can be genuinely vulnerable with each other. Team members regularly engage in productive, unfiltered conflict around important issues. The team leaves meetings with clear-cut, active, and specific agreements around decisions. Team members hold one another accountable to commitments and
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DISCIPLINE 2 Create Clarity
