The advantage

The Model - The Advantage (by Patrick Lencioni)

1. Building a cohesive leadership team

The first step is to ensure that the leaders of the organization behave in a functional, cohesive way.

If the people responsible for running an organization - whether it’s a company, a department within that company, a start-up, a restaurant, a school, or a church - are behaving dysfunctionally, then that dysfunction will continue in a stepwise manner throughout the rest of the organization and put a brake on a healthy organization.

And yes, there are concrete steps a leadership team can take to prevent this from happening.

Cohesive teams eliminate politics and increase their effectiveness by doing the following:

• Being open and building trust
• Engaging in constructive ideological conflict
• Commit to clear decisions
• Holding each other accountable for behavior and performance
• Focusing on collective results

2. Creating clarity

The second step to building a healthy organization is ensuring that the members of that leadership team are intellectually aligned around six simple but crucial questions.

Leaders must be clear on topics such as why the organization exists and what the main priority is for the coming months.

Leaders must eliminate any gaps between them so that people one, two, or three levels below have complete clarity about what they need to do to make the organization successful.

Healthy organizations reduce the potential for confusion by clarifying the following:

• Why do we exist?
• How do we behave?
• What do we do?
• How will we succeed?
• What is the most important thing right now?
• Who should do what?

3. Enhancing brightness

Finally, in addition to over-communicating, leaders must ensure that the answers to the six critical questions are repeatedly emphasized using simple, human systems.

That means that every process involving people, from hiring and firing to performance management and decision-making, is custom-designed to intentionally support and emphasize the uniqueness of the organization.

In addition to these four steps, it is essential that a healthy organization get better at the one activity that underlies everything it does: meetings. Yes, meetings.

Without making a few simple but fundamental changes in the way meetings take place, a healthy organization will struggle to maintain what it has worked hard to build.

Can a healthy organization fail?

Yes. But it almost never does. Really. When politics, ambiguity, dysfunction, and unclearness are minimized, people are inspired to design products, serve customers, solve problems, and help each other in ways that unhealthy organizations can only dream of.

Healthy organizations recover from setbacks, attract the best people, repel the others, and create opportunities they could not have expected.

At the end of the day, at the end of the quarter, employees are happier, results are stronger, and executives are at ease knowing they have fulfilled their most important responsibility: creating a successful environment.

Organizations solidify their health by ensuring consistency in;

• Recruiting
• Managing performance
• Rewards and recognition
• Employee dismissal
• Meetings

4. Clarity about communicating

Only after these first two steps are in progress (behavioral and intellectual alignment) an organization can take the third step: over-communicate the answers to the six questions.

Leaders of a healthy organization constantly - and I mean constantly - repeat and emphasize what is true and important. They always make the mistake of saying too much rather than too little.

This quality alone distinguishes leaders of healthy organizations from others.

Healthy organizations align their employees around organizational clarity by communicating key messages through;

• Repetition
• Simplicity
• Multiple mediums
• Step-wise messages