The Advantage

No one on a cohesive team can say, Well, I did my job. Our failure isn’t my fault.

Executives must put the needs of the higher team ahead of the needs of their departments.

When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer.

The fear of conflict is almost always a sign of problems.

If people don’t weigh in, they can’t buy in.

Clarification of the organizational goals and values is not enough. People fully understand information when they hear it more times, from different sources. So, communicate the messages you wish your employees to comprehend repeatedly.

Question 6: How do we behave? Identify an organisation’s values that define how it must behave to succeed.

Question 5: Who must do what? Define clear roles and responsibilities for each member of the leadership team.

Question 3: What do we do? A straightforward list of key activities.

Question 2: How will we succeed? This identifies strategies for success that an organization will follow, to deliver on its core purpose.

Question 1: Why do we exist? This defines an organization’s core purpose or reason for being.

Dysfunction 5: Inattention to results. Attention to team success, not individual goals and personal status, is only possible with high levels of commitment.

Dysfunction 4: Avoidance of accountability. With high levels of commitment, team members can hold one another accountable and eliminate the possibility of people saying “I never agreed to that in the first place”.

Dysfunction 3: Lack of commitment. Teams that master conflict can commit to team decisions: “if people don’t weigh in, they won’t buy in”, so teams must “disagree and commit”.

Dysfunction 2: Fear of conflict. Teams that trust one another can focus on mastering constructive conflict in the pursuit of truth, to discover what’s best for the team.

Dysfunction 1: Absence of trust. Teams must have high levels of vulnerability-based trust where people are completely comfortable being transparent and honest with one another, and prepared to sacrifice their egos for the good of the team.

Meetings are vital to any organization—good meetings deliver clarity and alignment while bad meetings are wasteful and frustrating. In his earlier book, Death by Meeting, Lencioni explained (via a fable) 4 types of meetings that any healthy organization should have: daily check-ins, weekly tactical meetings, monthly/ad-hoc topical meetings, and quarterly off-site reviews.

Discipline 4: Reinforce clarity by aligning systems of recruitment and onboarding, performance management, reward and recognition, and letting people go with organisational values and priorities.

Discipline 3: Align the organization by over-communicating the answers to each of the six questions. Employees need to hear the messages over and over (up to seven times is a good benchmark) before they understand and believe what leaders are saying.

Discipline 2: Create organizational clarity by answering six questions. Confusion and misdirection can be prevented, if employees know not only where the company is headed but also what they have to do to take it there.

Discipline 1: Build a cohesive leadership team that overcomes the five dysfunctions of a team

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

Conflict is about issues and ideas, while accountability is about performance and behavior.

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

Seizing the advantage, the power of organizational health is undeniable. Even the most skeptical executives I meet don't dispute the advantage they could achieve if they could make their leadership teams more cohesive, align them around the answers to the six questions – what do we do, what is most important right now, who must do what, why do we exist, what are our values, and what is our wealth-focused purpose – and get them to communicate and reinforce those answers incessantly.

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.

Question 4: What’s most important, right now? Identify a single, temporary thematic goal (e.g. introduce three new products by the end of the year) that is then translated into a set of supporting objectives (e.g. complete market testing, recruit new product teams, complete product design, redesign production processes etc.). A set of standard operating objectives is also developed to articulate important ongoing metrics (e.g. revenue, expenditure, employee engagement, customer satisfaction etc.)

Healthy organizations out-compete smart organizations (but of course it is best to be both healthy and smart).

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