Book Review: The Advantage

I have read every one of Patrick Lencioni’s books.  I have learned so much from each of his previous books about integrity, leadership, and service, that I was really excited to hear of the release of his newest book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business.  Lencioni normally writes his leadership books as a fable and then discusses the major principles in the second half of the book.  The Advantage is a collaboration of what Lencioni has covered in his other books with additional information that directly relates to organizational health.

As a part of a strong leadership team that leads an incredible group of professionals, I appreciated Lencioni’s inclusion of anecdotal information and particularly the descriptions of various exercises that he takes teams through.  I picked up some ideas for faculty meetings and other team gatherings.  Lencioni’s main point throughout is that the leader must lead the way.  He is definitely not a fan of the “heard, but not seen” old style of back room management.

I highlighted several things while reading…

• The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health.
• Organizational health permeates so many aspects of a company that isolating any one variable and measuring its financial impact is almost impossible to do in a precise way.  That certainly doesn’t mean the impact isn’t real, tangible, and massive; it just requires a level of conviction and intuition that many overly analytical leaders have a hard time accepting.
• A good way to recognize health is to look for the signs that indicate an organization has it.  These include minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees.
• I’ve become absolutely convoked that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.
• Most organizations exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them. But the healthy ones tap into almost all of it.
• DISCIPLINE 1: Build a cohesive leadership team
• DISCIPLINE 2: Create clarity
• DISCIPLINE 3: Overcommunicate clarity
• DISCIPLINE 4: Reinforce clarity
• Teamwork is not a virtue.  It is a choice–and a strategic one.
• A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.
• When executives put people on their leadership teams for the wrong reasons, they muddy the criteria for why the team exists at all.
• At the heat of vulnerability lies the willingness of people to abandon their pride and their fear, to sacrifice their egos for the collective good of the team.
• When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer.
• One of the best ways for leaders to raise the level of healthy conflict on a team is by mining for conflict during meetings.
• Peer-to-peer accountability is the primary and most effective source of accountability on a leadership team.
• Why would a team member want to confront a colleague about an issue when the team leader isn’t willing to and is probably going to let them off the hook anyway?
• To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies.
• There is nothing noble about withholding information that can help an employee improve.
• Teams that lead healthy organizations come to terms with the difficult but critical requirement that is members must put the needs of the higher team ahead of the needs of their department.
• Six Critical Questions of Clarity

1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important, right now?
6. Who must do what?

• Employees in every organization, and at every level, need to know that at the heart of what they do lies something grand and aspirational.
• If an organization is tolerant of everything, it will stand for nothing.
• Leaders would rather forget short-term revenue than diminish the brand that they believed was critical to their differentiation and long-term success.
• Many leadership teams struggle with not wanting to walk away from opportunities.  Strategic anchors give them the clarity and courage to overcome these distractions and stay on course.
• 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.
• Great leaders see themselves as Chief Reminding Officers as much as anything else.
• There are three keys to cascading communication: message consistency from one leader to another, timeliness of delivery, and live, realtime communication.  This starts toward the end of leadership team meetings, a time when executives are usually trying their best to get out the door.  That’s when someone needs to ask the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: “Hey, what are we going to go back and tell our people?”
• An organization has to institutionalize its culture without bureaucratizing it.
• The single most important reason to reward people is to provide them with an incentive for doing what is best for the organization.
• Keeping a relatively strong performer who is not a cultural fit sends a loud and clear message to employees that the organization isn’t all that serious about what it says it believes.
• Bad meetings are the birthplace of unhealthy organizations, and good meetings are the origin of cohesion, clarity, and communication.
• There is just no escaping the fact that the single biggest factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier–or not–is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the person in charge.