The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

The Sophistication Bias:

The Adrenaline Bias:

The Quantification Bias:

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.

The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, expertise, and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.

the leadership team of a healthy organization must be intellectually aligned and committed to the same answers to six simple but critical questions.

A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.

there are two critical ways that members of effective teams must communicate: advocacy and inquiry.

When more than eight or nine people are on a team, members tend to advocate a heck of a lot more than they inquire.

When leaders preach teamwork but exclusively reward individual achievement, they are confusing their people and creating an obstacle to true team behavior.

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.”

What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.

People will not actively commit to a decision if they have not had the opportunity to provide input, ask questions, and understand the rationale behind it.

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. Most people assume that the leader of an executive team should be the primary source of accountability—and that’s the norm in most unhealthy organizations—but it isn’t efficient or practical, and it makes little sense.

Unfortunately, it is far more natural, and common, for leaders to avoid holding people accountable.

allow them to admit that they are the ones who don’t want to feel bad and that failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness.

The reason that behavioral accountability is more important than the quantitative, results-related kind has nothing to do with the fact that it is harder. It is due to the fact that behavioral problems almost always precede—and cause—a downturn in performance and results.

Losing a team member is not at all a common outcome of building a culture of accountability. In most cases, team members simply learn to demand more of one another and watch their collective performance improve. In some cases, though, the only way for them to do that is by losing someone from the team.

What would members of an executive team be focused on if not the results of their organization? Well, for one, the results of their department.

the only measure of a great team—or a great organization—is whether it accomplishes what it sets out to accomplish.

When it comes to how a cohesive team measures its performance, one criterion sets it apart from noncohesive ones: its goals are shared across the entire team.

Great teams ensure that all members, in spite of their individual responsibilities and areas of expertise, are doing whatever they can to help the team accomplish its goals.

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 behaviors. Members of the leadership team are focused on team number one. They put the collective priorities and needs of the larger organization ahead of their own departments.

The second requirement for building a healthy organization—creating clarity—is all about achieving alignment.

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 in.

But all too often—and this is critical—leaders underestimate the impact of even subtle misalignment at the top, and the damage caused to the rest of the organization by small gaps among members of the executive team.

There is probably no greater frustration for employees than having to constantly navigate the politics and confusion caused by leaders who are misaligned.

These are the six questions: 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?

without using jargon and smarmy language—they

More than getting the right answer, it is important to simply have an answer—one that is directionally correct and around which all team members can commit.

Employees in every organization, and at every level, need to know that at the heart of what they do lies something grand and aspirational. They’re well aware that ultimately it will boil down to tangible, tactical activities.

all organizations exist to make people’s lives better.

Nonetheless, every organization must contribute in some way to a better world for some group of people, because if it doesn’t, it will, and should, go out of business.