Note: I can think of few books that have had more impact on how I lead and on my organization than The Advantage. It is a simple, yet power model for building organizational health through clarity of thought and disciplined action.
THE ADVANTAGE - Patrick Lencioni
The Case for Organizational Health
The greatest single advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. It provides the context for strategy, finance, technology, and everything else that happens within it. It is the single greatest factor for determining success.
Why don’t more embrace it?
✓ The sophistication bias – “it is beneath them” – too simple.
✓ The adrenaline bias – it takes time and isn’t about firefighting.
✓ The quantification bias – the benefits are difficult to quantify.
Smart vs. Healthy Organizations
- Smart organizations are good at the decision sciences – but smart does not mean they are healthy or successful. It is hard to maintain a competitive advantage based on smarts.
- Healthy organizations have minimal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, and low turnover. An organization that is healthy inevitably gets better over time.
Discipline 1 – Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance it will become healthy.
A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.
A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.
The only reason that a person should be on the leadership team is that they represent a key part of the organization or truly brings a critical talent or intangible to the table.
Behavior 1: Building Trust
It is important to learn each other's personal histories (where they are coming from) and to conduct personality profiling (Myers-Briggs, etc.) to learn how each other thinks.
Vulnerability is also a key component to building strong teams and trust; we have to be able to share who we are; both strengths and weaknesses.
Behavior 2: Mastering Conflict
Productive ideological conflict, the willingness to disagree, even passionately when necessary, around important issues and discussions is healthy and necessary. We must overcome the tendency to run from discomfort; do not try to avoid conflict. When leadership team members avoid discomfort among themselves, they only transfer it in far greater quantities to larger groups of people throughout the organization. Too often we create an “artificial harmony” that isn’t real and hurts the organization.
Conflict tools
✓Mining for conflict – when you suspect that there is unearthed conflict in the room, demand that people come clean. Don’t assume silence is agreement. Probe for agreement. Ask each member if they agree.
Conflict is also important because people can’t achieve commitment without it. You can’t buy in to an idea until you have weighed in on it.
When leadership teams wait for consensus before taking action, they usually end up with decisions that are made too late and are mildly disagreeable to everyone. This is a recipe for mediocrity and frustration.
Leadership teams must arrive at specific agreements – with clarity for all. They must also stick around long enough to review agreements and ensure clarity.
Behavior 4 – Embracing Accountability
Success and health require appropriate peer pressure to succeed. Leaders must be willing to step in, however, the most successful form of accountability is from peers.
To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies. Failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness. Because behavioral issues almost always precede performance issues, it is critical to call out those behaviors early.
Behavior 5 – Focusing on Results
No matter how good a leadership team feels about itself or how noble their mission might be, if the organization it leads rarely achieves its goals, then, by definition it’s simply not a good team.
Goals must be shared by entire team (one team, one score). Leadership teams must place a higher priority on the team goals than on their own departments. Leaders must be willing to volunteer to help others on the team succeed.
Discipline 2 – Create Clarity
Alignment is about creating so much clarity that there is as little room as possible for confusion, disorder, and in-fighting. Leaders underestimate the impact of even subtle misalignment at the top and the damage it causes. Just a little light between leadership team members is blinding to those one or two levels below.
Six Critical Questions
1.) Why do we exist?
- Employees in every organization, and at every level, need to know that at the heart of what they do lies something grand and aspirational.
- Must be idealistic. Is not about marketing, rather about clarity.
- Start by asking, “How do we contribute to a better world?” Then keep asking “why” until you reach the bottom.
2.) How do we behave?
- Core values: 2-3 behavioral traits that define you, are true, and that you are willing to be punished for living them and at times employees might take them too far. Must be intolerant when people do not follow them. To identify – think of employees who embody what is best about the organization and then figure out what makes them stand out. Do the same for the negative folks.
- Aspirational Values: Values an organization wishes it had and knows it must develop them.
- Permission to Play Values: Minimal behavioral standards.
3.) What do we do?
- Nothing more than a description of what the organization actually does. One sentence, non-marketing, keep it simple.
4.) How will we succeed?
- An organization’s strategy is nothing more than the collection of intentional decisions a company makes to give itself the best chance to thrive and differentiate from competitors.
- Identify Strategic Anchors: Reverse-engineer by taking everything you know about the organization. An Exhaustive list of all the decisions and realities that form the context of the current situation. Look for patterns that indicate strategic direction (anchors).
5.) What is Most Important, Right Now?
- 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.
- Leaders on the team must be invested without their departmental hats, focused on the larger organization.
- A thematic goal: singular, qualitative, temporary, shared across the leadership team.
6.) Who Must Do What?
- Ensure there is clarity on who is responsible for what by when.
The Playbook - Once the leadership team has answered each of the 6 questions, it is absolutely critical for them to capture those answers in a concise, actionable way so they can use them for communication, decision making, and planning going forward.
Discipline 3 – Over-communicate Clarity
People are skeptical about what they’re being told unless they hear it consistently over time.
Leaders often confuse the mere transfer of information to the audience’s ability to understand, internalize, and embrace what is being communicated.
Messaging is not so much an intellectual process as an emotional one.
Cascading Communication
✓True Rumors – After leadership has agreed, those leaders need to meet with their direct team and have those teams meet with their direct team to cascade information/agreements quickly (24 hours).
Discipline 4 – Reinforce Clarity
Make sure that human systems – every process that involved people – from hiring and people management to training and compensation, is designed to reinforce the answers to the questions. Leadership must take responsibility for these human systems and set direction, not delegate responsibility. The fact is that the best human systems are often the simplest and least sophisticated ones. Must have appropriate balance of gut vs. structure: Put just enough structure in place to ensure a measure of consistency and adherence to core values – and no more.
Performance Management – Healthy organizations believe that performance management is almost exclusively about eliminating confusion. Keep the systems simple.
Recommendation: Whether a small not-for-profit or a large global organization, the simple model put forth in this book will positively impact the health of your organization. I recommend you read and re-read it. Here's the link to it from Amazon: The Advantage
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Dear Friend,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. This particular post came directly from The Advantage, one of my favorite books. I've used the five questions with several organizations and yielded positive outcomes. If I can be helpful to you, please let me know.
Warm Regards,
Matt