Brief Review: “The Advantage”

“The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business” by Patrick Lencioni is a business book tailored to leaders and the fundamental disciplines necessary to run a great business and organization.

Lencioni starts the book by explaining what is organizational health and what are the biases that lead leaders not to focus on these common sense goals and activities. Organizational health is about “integrity…when its management, operations, strategy and culture fit together and make sense”. He describes organizations that must be smart AND healthy:

• Smart — Strategy, Marketing, Finance, and Technology
• Healthy — Minimal Politics, Minimal Confusion, High Morale, High Productivity, Low Turnover

The biases he cite — are those biases that preclude leaders from focusing on organizational health:

• sophistication bias — organizational health seems too simple
• adrenaline bias — the rush to focus on the urgent
• quantification bias — the challenge in quantifying all aspects of organizational health

The case he makes for organizational health is that strong organizational health helps lead to a learning organization —an organization that prioritizes and embodies learning and gets smarter over time — and one that can multiply intelligence — providing a ripe and fertile ground for intellectual capital to grow and develop beyond the direct leaders.

Having defined organizational health and explained its importance and why it appears elusive (and not focused on by many) — he goes on to explain the four disciplines model that are required to achieve strong organizational health.

Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

Discipline 2: Create Clarity

Discipline 3: Over-Communicate Clarity

Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity

Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

A cohesive leadership team ensures that all leaders are working together towards the biggest goals of the business. Five behaviors are necessary to support that:

1. Building Trust
2. Mastering Conflict
3. Achieve Commitment
4. Embracing Accountability
5. Focusing on Results

The concepts are clear — but speak about having a team that trusts one another (truly), that can have productive conversations including necessary conflict, have the necessary commitment and accountability — and ultimately that the team (as a team) focuses on the broadest results of the business — not the results of their own areas or departments.

Discipline 2: Create Clarity

The idea behind clarity as has been shared in many other business and leadership books is to have a clear, shared understanding so that all individuals in an organization know which way to pull and the governing principles with which to take action. To achieve clarity — all organizations need to be able to answer these 6 questions well:

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?

With simple, clear answers to those questions — team members have an opportunity to do their best work in alignment with the rest of the organization.

Discipline 3: Over-Communicate Clarity

This is simple but a message that is understood well from marketing — that saying a message and having a message become internalized are not the same. The message needs to be stated, repeated, again and again — so that a) individuals know that the message is true, agreed upon, and b) that people start to internalize the message and, most importantly, begin to make it their own and re-communicate.

Personally I believe the ability for a message to be “recommunicable” is one of the most important aspects of the message .

Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity

The last part of reinforce clarity is less about communicating the message — but ensuring alignment to the message through people. How the organization:

• recruiting and hiring
• managing performance, performance reviews and feedback
• firing/terminating employees
• managing compensation
• sharing and delivering recognition

The composition of the team, the values the team embodies — and how those are hired (fired) and rewarded are critical components of clarifying the message, values, how the work gets done. People are the embodiment of the organization — and as leaders — to have a healthy organization — the clarity must be delivered through the actions with people…even when uncomfortable.

In general I found this book to be a straightforward and helpful business book. I found myself agreeing with many of the disciplines — and that they reflected many of my experiences in organizations where I’ve seen things done well and not so well. Its a quick read and offers a fresh perspective on some fundamental aspects of running a strong organization —several of which we often forget or overlook as a result of the biases that Lencioni mentions. I think the message is clear — that having strong organization health is critical and as leaders its an important investment to ensure strong organizational health — even in the face of seemingly more important activities.