The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

For the next few minutes, sometimes longer, leaders need to review their discussions from the meeting and decide which of their decisions are ready to be communicated and which are not.

what teams shouldn’t do is wordsmith those messages to death and make themselves sound like robotic leaders going out to read from the same exact script. Instead, they need to get clear on the main points to communicate and then go to their teams to explain those points in their own words.

It’s critical that leaders do this during a short and consistent time frame.

Many executives ask if they can communicate the results of a meeting using e-mail or even voice mail. The answer is no.

The best way to do cascading communication is face-to-face and live.

when doing cascading communication, whenever it’s possible, is to do it with an entire group of direct reports at the same time instead of one by one.

CHECKLIST FOR DISCIPLINE 3: OVERCOMMUNICATE CLARITY Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements: The leadership team has clearly communicated the six aspects of clarity to all employees. Team members regularly remind the people in their departments about those aspects of clarity. The team leaves meetings with clear and specific agreements about what to communicate to their employees, and they cascade those messages quickly after meetings. Employees are able to accurately articulate the organization’s reason for existence, values, strategic anchors, and goals.

DISCIPLINE 4 Reinforce Clarity

As important as overcommunication is, leaders of a healthy organization cannot always be around to remind employees about the company’s reason for existing, its values, and so on.

In order to ensure that the answers to the six critical questions become embedded in the fabric of the organization, leaders must do everything they can to reinforce them structurally as well.

the most important human systems that an organization needs, according to the logical life cycle of an employee.

RECRUITING AND HIRING

ORIENTATION

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

COMPENSATION AND REWARDS

RECOGNITION

FIRING

CHECKLIST FOR DISCIPLINE 4: REINFORCE CLARITY Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements: The organization has a simple way to ensure that new hires are carefully selected based on the company’s values. New people are brought into the organization by thoroughly teaching them about the six elements of clarity. Managers throughout the organization have a simple, consistent, and nonbureaucratic system for setting goals and reviewing progress with employees. That system is customized around the elements of clarity. Employees who don’t fit the values are managed out of the organization. Poor performers who do fit the values are given the coaching and assistance they need to succeed. Compensation and reward systems are built around the values and goals of the organization.

The Centrality of Great Meetings

No action, activity, or process is more central to a healthy organization than the meeting.

THE FOUR MEETINGS So what kinds of meetings does the leadership team of a healthy organization have? There are four basic types:

1. Daily Check-Ins

2. Tactical Staff Meetings

3. Adhoc Topical Meetings

4. Quarterly Off-Site Reviews

CHECKLIST FOR MEETINGS Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered meetings when they can affirm the following statements: Tactical and strategic discussions are addressed in separate meetings. During tactical staff meetings, agendas are set only after the team has reviewed its progress against goals. Noncritical administrative topics are easily discarded. During topical meetings, enough time is allocated to major issues to allow for clarification, debate, and resolution. The team meets quarterly away from the office to review what is happening in the industry, in the organization, and on the team.

FIRST CRITICAL STEPS In order to give their organizations the best possible chance of succeeding in these efforts, a team must engage in a few vital initial steps to get momentum started. The first of those is setting aside time to launch the process. What I’m talking about is an initial off-site, a couple of days away from the office—productive, intense, non-touchy-feely days—working on the first two disciplines of building team cohesion and creating clarity.

After that initial off-site, the team will need to put together a playbook, a short summary of those answers and a few other items related to how the team behaves and how it will go about working together going forward. And once the information in the playbook has been finalized and the answers fully agreed on by the team, the next step will be to properly communicate it to the rest of the organization. This will require some kind of initial communication, followed by ongoing reminders from leaders using every form of communication at their disposal. And finally, the leadership team will need to spend time, probably a fair amount of time, designing systems to reinforce the information from the playbook by embedding it into every process that involves people.