The Advantage, Enhanced Edition: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business (J-B Lencioni Series)

by Patrick Lencioni

To be fair, the firm taught me quite a bit about strategy and finance and marketing, but not much about organizations and how they should be run as a whole. But somehow I became convinced that the biggest problem our clients faced, and their biggest opportunity for competitive advantage, was not really about strategy or finance or marketing; it was something a little less tangible—something that seemed to revolve around the way they managed their organizations.

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.

More than a side dish or a flavor enhancer for the real meat and potatoes of business, it is the very plate on which the meat and potatoes sit. The health of an organization provides the context for strategy, finance, marketing, technology, and everything else that happens within it, which is why it is the single greatest factor determining an organization’s success.

More than talent.

More than kno...

More than inn...

The Sophistication Bias:

The Adrenaline Bias:

The Quantification Bias:

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.

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. Two Requirements for Success

being smart—as critical as it is—has become something of a commodity. It is simply permission to play, a minimum standard required for having even a possibility of success. It’s certainly not enough to achieve a meaningful, sustainable competitive advantage over any length of time.

After two decades of working with CEOs and their teams of senior executives, I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.

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.

DISCIPLINE 1: BUILD A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM

There can be no daylight between leaders around these fundamental issues.

When it comes to reinforcing clarity, there is no such thing as too much communication.

in order for an organization to remain healthy over time, 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.

That’s because cohesive leadership teams prevent groupthink, learn from mistakes, and call each other on potential problems before they get out of hand. And

Becoming a real team requires an intentional decision on the part of its members. I like to say that teamwork is not a virtue. It is a choice—and a strategic one. That means leaders who choose to operate as a real team willingly accept the work and the sacrifices that are necessary for any group that wants to reap the benefits of true teamwork. But before they can do that, they should understand and agree on a common definition of what a leadership team really is. A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.

A leadership team should be made up of somewhere between three and twelve people, though anything over eight or nine is usually problematic. There is nothing dogmatic about this size limit. It is just a practical reality.

When more than eight or nine people are on a team, members tend to advocate a heck of a lot more than they inquire. This makes sense because they aren’t confident that they’re going to get the opportunity to speak again soon, so they use their scarce floor time to announce their position or make a point. When a team is small, members are more likely to use much of their time asking questions and seeking clarity, confident that they’ll be able to regain the floor and share their ideas or opinions when necessary.

The only reason that a person should be on a team is that she represents a key part of the organization or brings truly critical talent or insight to the table.

Collective responsibility implies, more than anything else, selflessness and shared sacrifices from team members.

Members of a truly cohesive team must trust one another.

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.”

They speak more freely and fearlessly with one another and don’t waste time and energy putting on airs or pretending to be someone they’re not. Over time, this creates a bond that exceeds what many people ever experience in their lives and, sometimes, unfortunately, even in their families.

At the heart of vulnerability lies the willingness of people to abandon their pride and their fear, to sacrifice their egos for the collective good of the team.

It’s ultimately about the practical goal of maximizing the performance of a group of people. And it’s entirely achievable for both teams that are just coming together for the first time and those that have been working in a less-than-trusting environment for years.

That’s why, during an off-site session, we take teams through a quick exercise where we ask them to tell everyone, briefly, a few things about their lives. In particular, we have them say where they were born, how many siblings they have, where they fall in the order of children, and finally, what the most interesting or difficult challenge was for them as a kid. Again, we’re not interested in their inner childhoods, just what was uniquely challenging for them growing up.

The key to the usefulness of profiling tools is that the information that is uncovered is neutral; in other words, there are no good or bad types. Everything is valid, and every type of team member is as useful as the next.

Every person has many natural tendencies that are useful and helpful to a team and a few that are not. The goal is to get everyone on the team to identify and reveal those tendencies to their peers, both for the practical purpose of having them understand one another and to help them get comfortable being transparent and vulnerable about their shortcomings and limitations.

fundamental attribution error.4

At the heart of the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.

Of course, this kind of misattribution, where we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt but assume the worst about others, breaks down trust on a team.

To believe that a person on a team can be too vulnerable is really to suggest that she would be wise to withhold information about her weaknesses, mistakes, or need for help. This is almost never a good idea. Perhaps during the initial stages of team development, complete vulnerability is not a realistic expectation. But soon after, the only way for teams to build real trust is for team members to come clean about who they are, warts and all.

The only way for the leader of a team to create a safe environment for his team members to be vulnerable is by stepping up and doing something that feels unsafe and uncomfortable first. By getting naked before anyone else, by taking the risk of making himself vulnerable with no guarantee that other members of the team will respond in kind, a leader demonstrates an extraordinary level of selflessness and dedication to the team. And that gives him the right, and the confidence, to ask others to do the same.

Only when teams build vulnerability-based trust do they put themselves in a position to embrace the other four behaviors, the next of which is the mastery of conflict.

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.

When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer. It is not only okay but desirable. Conflict without trust, however, is politics, an attempt to manipulate others in order to win an argument regardless of the truth.

Avoiding conflict creates problems even beyond boring meetings and poorly vetted decisions, as bad as those things are. When leadership team members avoid discomfort among themselves, they only transfer it in far greater quantities to larger groups of people throughout the organization they’re supposed to be serving.

And that’s okay, because there is more than one way to engage in healthy conflict. What’s not okay is for team members to avoid disagreement, hold back their opinions on important matters, and choose their battles carefully based on the likely cost of disagreement. That is a recipe for both bad decision making and interpersonal resentment.

Contrary to what we see in movies and on television, where people go to meetings and argue like battle-tested generals, most organizations live somewhere fairly close to the artificial harmony end of this continuum. They go out of their way to avoid direct, uncomfortable disagreement during meetings or doing anything that would suggest moving away from their comfortable end of the scale.

The optimal place to be on this continuum is just to the left of the demarcation line (the Ideal Conflict Point). That would be the point where a team is engaged in all the constructive conflict they could possibly have, but never stepping over the line into destructive territory.

Nowhere does this tendency toward artificial harmony show itself more than in mission-driven nonprofit organizations, most notably churches. People who work in those organizations tend to have a misguided idea that they cannot be frustrated or disagreeable with one another. What they’re doing is confusing being nice with being kind.

mining for conflict during meetings.

At first, mining for conflict might seem like stirring the pot and looking for trouble. But it is quite the opposite. By looking for and exposing potential and even subtle disagreements that have not come to the surface, team leaders—and, heck, team members can do it too—avoid the destructive hallway conversations that inevitably result when people are reluctant to engage in direct, productive debate.

So when a leader sees her people engaging in disagreement during a meeting, even over something relatively innocuous, she should do something that may seem counterintuitive but is remarkably helpful: interrupt. That’s right. Just as people are beginning to challenge one another, she should stop them for a moment to remind them that what they are doing is good.

Trust must be established if real conflict is to occur.

In a similar way that trust enables conflict, conflict allows a team to move on to the next critical behavior of a cohesive team: achieving commitment.