The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

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.

1. Why do we exist? 2. How do we behave? 3. What do we do? 4. How will we succeed? 5. What is most important, right now? 6. Who must do what?

QUESTION 2: HOW DO WE BEHAVE?

when it comes to creating organizational clarity and alignment, intolerance is essential. After all, if an organization is tolerant of everything, it will stand for nothing.

The answer to the question, How do we behave?, is embodied in an organization’s core values, which should provide the ultimate guide for employee behavior at all levels.

An important key to identifying the right, small set of behavioral values is understanding that there are different kinds of values

Among these, core values are by far the most important and must not be confused with the others.

Core Values These are the few—just two or three—behavioral traits that are inherent in an organization.

Aspirational Values These are the characteristics that an organization wants to have, wishes it already had, and believes it must develop in order to maximize its success in its current market environment.

Permission-to-Play Values These values are the minimum behavioral standards that are required in an organization. Although they are extremely important, permission-to-play values don’t serve to clearly define or differentiate an organization

Values that commonly fit into this category include honesty, integrity, and respect for others.

Accidental Values These values are the traits that are evident in an organization but have come about unintentionally and don’t necessarily serve the good of the organization.

separating core from aspirational values can be done by asking the questions, Is this trait inherent and natural for us, and has it been apparent in the organization for a long time? Or, is it something that we have to work hard to cultivate? A core value will have been apparent for a long time and requires little intentional provocation.

Permission-to-play values are also often confused with core. The best way to differentiate them is to ask, Would our organization be able to credibly claim that we are more committed to this value than 99 percent of the companies in our industry?

QUESTION 3: WHAT DO WE DO?

Just an unsexy, one-sentence definition—something your grandmother can understand (no offense to grandmas). The answer to this question is something we call an organization’s business definition (but never a mission statement!).

QUESTION 4: HOW WILL WE SUCCEED?

When team leaders answer this question, essentially they are determining their strategy.

QUESTION 5: WHAT IS MOST IMPORTANT, RIGHT NOW?

More than any of the other questions, answering this one will have the most immediate and tangible impact on an organization, probably because it addresses two of the most maddening day-to-day challenges companies face: organizational A.D.D. and silos.

every organization, if it wants to create a sense of alignment and focus, must have a single top priority within a given period of time.

The Thematic Goal (a.k.a. The Rallying Cry)

A thematic goal is … Singular. One thing has to be most important, even if there are other worthy goals under consideration. Qualitative. The thematic goal should almost never be established with specific numbers attached to it.

Temporary. A thematic goal must be achievable within a clear time boundary, almost always between three and twelve months.

Shared across the leadership team.

The best way to identify a thematic goal is to answer the question, If we accomplish only one thing during the next x months, what would it be? In other words, What must be true x months from now for us to be able to look back and say with any credibility that we had a good period?

Regardless of how it is communicated within the larger organization, it’s worth repeating that every thematic goal must become the collective responsibility of the leadership team.

Divisional rivalry and infighting become much less likely as leaders stop seeing their primary responsibility as solely running their own departments.

Defining Objectives

Realizing the benefits of having a clear and collective focus requires more than merely identifying the thematic goal. That goal must then be further clarified by defining the objectives which will make accomplishing it possible. I call these, for obvious reasons, defining objectives.

Defining objectives are the general categories of activity required to achieve the thematic goal.

Like the thematic goal, defining objectives must be qualitative, temporary, and shared by the leadership team. They provide a level of specificity so that the thematic goal isn’t merely a slogan but rather a specific and understandable call to action. In most cases, there are between four and six defining objectives, depending on the nature of the goal itself.

Standard Operating Objectives

Once teams identify their defining objectives, they have to take on the next, and last, step in the thematic goal process: identifying their standard operating objectives.

I like to refer to these responsibilities as the “leaders’ day jobs.”

The One-Page Model Different kinds of organizations have different thematic goals, defining objectives, and standard operating objectives for a variety of reasons. However, what they all have in common is that their goals fit on a single sheet of paper.

QUESTION 6: WHO MUST DO WHAT?

Without clarity around that division of labor, the potential for politics and infighting, even among well-intentioned people, is great.

THE PLAYBOOK Once the leadership team has answered each of the six critical questions, it is absolutely critical for them to capture those answers in a concise, actionable way so that they can use them for communication, decision making, and planning going forward.

playbook: a simple document summarizing the answers to the six critical questions. While every organization will, and should, create a playbook that is customized to their needs, there are two things that the leaders of any organization should do to make their playbook work. First, they must keep it short. Anything more than a few pages is unnecessary and discourages people from reviewing the playbook.

Second, leadership team members should keep their playbook with them at all times.

CHECKLIST FOR DISCIPLINE 2: CREATE CLARITY Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements: Members of the leadership team know, agree on, and are passionate about the reason that the organization exists. The leadership team has clarified and embraced a small, specific set of behavioral values. Leaders are clear and aligned around a strategy that helps them define success and differentiate from competitors. The leadership team has a clear, current goal around which they rally. They feel a collective sense of ownership for that goal. Members of the leadership team understand one another’s roles and responsibilities. They are comfortable asking questions about one another’s work. The elements of the organization’s clarity are concisely summarized and regularly referenced and reviewed by the leadership team.

DISCIPLINE 3 Overcommunicate Clarity

Once a leadership team has become cohesive and worked to establish clarity and alignment around the answers to the six critical questions, then, and only then, can they effectively move on to the next step: communicating those answers.

people are skeptical about what they’re being told unless they hear it consistently over time.

CASCADING COMMUNICATION

The most reliable and effective way to get an organization moving in the same direction is for members of a leadership team to come out of their meetings with a clear message about what was decided, promptly communicate that message to their direct reports, and have those direct reports do the same for their own direct reports.

There are three keys to cascading communication: message consistency from one leader to another, timeliness of delivery, and live, real-time communication.

This starts toward the end of leadership team meetings,

someone needs to ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: “Hey, what are we going to go...