The Advantage

Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

Patrick M. Lencioni

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118266106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Management

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides.

Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni's first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation's leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

DISCIPLINE 1

Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

WHAT’S IT WORTH TO YOU?

Imagine two organizations.

The first is led by a leadership team whose members are open with one another, passionately debate important issues, and commit to clear decisions even if they initially disagree. They call each other out when their behaviors or performance needs correction, and they focus their attention on the collective good of the organization.

The second is led by a leadership team whose members are guarded and less than honest with one another. They hold back during difficult conversations, feign commitment, and hesitate to call one another on unproductive behaviors. Often they pursue their own agendas rather than those of the greater organization.

The question: What kind of advantage would the first organization have over the second, and how much time and energy would it be worth investing to make this advantage a reality?

The first step a leadership team has to take if it wants the organization it leads to be healthy—and to achieve the advantages that go with it—is to make itself cohesive. There’s just no way around it. If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance that it will become healthy.

It’s kind of like a family. If the parents’ relationship is dysfunctional, the family will be too. That’s not to say that some good things can’t come out of it; it’s just that the family/company will not come anywhere close to realizing its full potential.

The importance of leadership team cohesion is almost never overtly disputed, even by the most cynical executives. But somehow, few organizations invest nearly enough time and energy in it, and certainly not with the level of rigor that building a cohesive team requires and deserves. So it’s difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that most organizations either give lip-service to the idea that teamwork at the top is critical, or they underestimate what it takes to achieve it. Whatever the case, it’s clear that a better approach needs to be taken if they are to eradicate dysfunction from their teams.

I should mention here that I wrote a book that addresses this topic. It’s called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and it’s a fable about a leader who takes over a political, dysfunctional team and works to turn it around. That book provides a fictional but thorough and realistic case study about how a team needs to wrestle with dysfunction in order to improve. I’ve also written a field guide, Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which provides detailed instructions for how to implement many of the exercises and tools we use in our consulting practice.¹

What I’ll do in this section is present a comprehensive overview of the model and provide advice about addressing the five dysfunctions and embracing the positive behaviors that are at the heart of any cohesive leadership team. I’ll also use real stories to draw on what I’ve learned from clients and readers since those books came out ten and seven years before this one, respectively.

But first, we need to get clear on what a leadership team really is.

DEFINING A LEADERSHIP “TEAM”

The word team has been so overused and misused in society that it has lost much of its impact. The truth is, few groups of leaders actually work like a team, at least not the kind that is required to lead a healthy organization. Most of them resemble what Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, authors of the book, The Wisdom of Teams, call a “working group.”²

A good way to understand a working group is to think of it like a golf team, where players go off and play on their own and then get together and add up their scores at the end of the day. A real team is more like a basketball team, one that plays together simultaneously, in an interactive, mutually dependent, and often interchangeable way. Most working groups reflexively call themselves teams because that’s the word society uses to describe any group of people who are affiliated in their work.

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.

Any concise definition of such a broadly defined and widely used term is going to need some clarification and further definition of terms. Here goes.

A Small Group of People

So many teams I’ve encountered struggle simply because they’re too large. This is a big problem and a common one. 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.

Having too many people on a team can cause a variety of logistical challenges, but the primary problem has to do with communication. When it comes to discussions and decision making, there are two critical ways that members of effective teams must communicate: advocacy and inquiry. A professor at Harvard, Chris Argyris, introduced this idea.³

Advocacy is the kind of communication that most people are accustomed to, and it is all about stating your case or making your point. I think we should change our advertising approach. Or, I recommend that we cut costs.

Inquiry is rarer and more important than advocacy. It happens when people ask questions to seek clarity about another person’s statement of advocacy. Why do you think the advertising approach is wrong? And which aspects of it are you referring to? Or, What evidence do you have that our expenses are too high? And how certain are you of this?

What does this have to do with the size of a team? Plenty. 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.

If this isn’t clear, consider an institution like the U.S. Congress or the United Nations, where members use their precious time at the podium making declarations and statements. The same is true in large committees or on task forces within organizations, where people rarely take the opportunity to probe for understanding and clarity, but instead merely pile opinion upon opinion. This inevitably leads to misunderstanding and poor decision making.

If this phenomenon is so compelling—and based on the evidence I’ve seen over the years in my work with leaders and their teams, I’m convinced it is—then it begs the question, Why do so many organizations still have too many people on their leadership teams?

Often it’s because they want to be “inclusive,” a politically correct way of saying they want to portray themselves as welcoming input from as many people as possible. And as nice as it may sound on a bumper sticker or a flowery poster, it is an ineffective and inefficient way to optimize decision making within an organization. Inclusivity, or the basic idea behind it, should be achieved by ensuring that the members of a leadership team are adequately representing and tapping into the opinions of the people who work for them, not by maximizing the size of the team.

Another reason that leadership teams are often too large is the lack of wisdom and courage on the part of the executives in charge who put people on their teams as a reward or as an enticement to join the company. I can’t give Bill a raise or a promotion, but I think he’ll be happy if I make him part of the executive team. Or maybe, If you come to work for my company, I’ll have you report directly to me. These are bad reasons to add staff to a leadership team.

The Noah’s Ark Management Team

A smallish telecommunications company purchased one of its equal-sized competitors, and in order to placate the executives of the acquired company, the CEO agreed to merge the two groups of leaders into what I call the “Noah’s Ark” management team. For every position on the executive team, there were two leaders, each representing one side of the merger. Two heads of marketing, two heads of sales, two heads of … you get it. As ridiculous as that sounds, they were convinced it was the best thing to do.

With so many people on the leadership team—I believe it peaked at seventeen—meetings became a mess. The group’s ability to be decisive and come to closure around decisions diminished, as you would expect, and executives grew so bored that a few would actually sleep during staff meetings (I kid you not).

Aside from the comedy of it all, what made this situation so fascinating to me was the way in which it was resolved. Executives eventually became so frustrated by the bureaucracy and wasted time that they started asking the CEO to take them off the team! They were willing to sacrifice their coveted place at the table, and report to a peer, just to avoid having to waste their time and energy working on such a large and unruly team.

Ironically, the ultimate impact of the Noah’s Ark approach was not an improvement in the morale of the people in the newly acquired company, but rather a prolonged period of transition, denial, and frustration.

When executives put people on their leadership teams for the wrong reasons, they muddy the criteria for why the team exists at all. 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. If someone is unhappy with his pay or status or wavering about accepting a job offer, the leader should deal with that issue head-on, not compound it by making the executive team larger and less productive.

It amazes me that intelligent people will sacrifice the effectiveness and manageability of their team for a tactical victory. This is undeniable evidence that many executives, in spite of what they might say, don’t really understand the importance of leadership team cohesiveness.

Collectively Responsible

This is perhaps the most important distinction between a working group and a real leadership team. Collective responsibility implies, more than anything else, selflessness and shared sacrifices from team members.

What kind of sacrifices am I talking about? Well, first are the tangible, literal sacrifices. These include standard things like budget allocations or head count, resources that need to be shifted from one suborganization or department to another. Making these kinds of sacrifices is much easier to commit to in theory than in practice, because no leader likes to go back to his or her department and announce that bonuses are going to be smaller or head count is going to be reduced in order to help out another department that needs it more. But that’s what members of real teams do.

There are other sacrifices that team members have to make beyond these tangible ones, and they come about on a much more regular basis—often daily. Two big ones are time and emotion.

Members of cohesive teams spend many hours working together on issues and topics that often don’t fall directly within their formal areas of responsibility. They go to meetings to help their team members solve problems even when those problems have nothing to do with their departments. And perhaps most challenging of all, they enter into difficult, uncomfortable discussions, even bringing up thorny issues with colleagues about their shortcomings, in order to solve problems that might prevent the team from achieving its objectives. They do this even when they’re tempted to avoid it all and go back to the relative safety of their offices to do what I refer to as their “day jobs,” that is, the work of their department.

Common Objectives

Though this is pretty straightforward, it’s worth stating that most of a leadership team’s objectives should be collective ones. If the most important goal within the organization is to increase sales, then every member of the team shares that goal. It isn’t just the responsibility of the head of sales. No one on a cohesive team can say, Well, I did my job. Our failure isn’t my fault.

This is another concept that plenty of leadership teams say they believe in but that few really embrace. Most of them rely far too heavily on people working exclusively within their areas of expertise, handing out different objectives to different team members based on their titles and management responsibilities. And while there will always be a need for division of labor and departmental expertise, leadership team members must see their goals as collective and shared when it comes to managing the top prioritie...