“Though I can’t be sure, I suspect that at some point about thirty years ago, a cleverly sadistic and anti-business consultant decided that the best way to really screw up companies was to convince them that what they needed was a convoluted, jargony, and all-encompassing declaration of intent.“
Patrick Lencioni is a consultant, best-selling author, and president of The Table Group, a consulting firm dedicated to building healthy organizations. He speaks and consults to a wide range of companies, including multinationals, start-ups,and non-profits.
His books include Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars, Death by Meeting, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, and Getting Naked: A Business Fable about Shedding the Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty.
His latest book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, is the culmination of Lencioni’s full body of work. And in the book, he lays out a strong case for why organizational health offers the greatest opportunity for competitive advantage.
Unlike his earlier books, this one isn’t in a fable format. Instead, he uses case studies, his experiences with clients, and his research to define organizational health and offer a path for leaders to achieve it.
The Four Disciplines of Organizational Health
- Build a Cohesive Leadership Team. If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance that it will become healthy.
- Create Clarity. Leaders create clarity for themselves and others when they are aligned, as a team, in such a way that there is no room for confusion, disorder, or infighting to set in.
- Over-communicate Clarity. Be sure everyone in the organization knows the answers to questions like, why does the organization exist? How do we behave? What do we do? And what is important right now?
- Reinforce Clarity. Be sure that every human system–every process that involves people–is designed to reinforce the answers to the organization’s most important questions.
You might also be interested in our print interviews with Patrick Lencioni on:
Getting Naked with Clients and The Dysfunctions of Teams
Podcast run time: 20:00
Intro music exluna by Jakub Koter.
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