Instaread - The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni

Guide to

Patrick Lencionis

The Advantage

Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business

by

Instaread

Please Note

This is a companion to the original book.

Copyright 2015 by Instaread. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written consent of the publisher.

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Table of Contents

The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni is a practical guide to organizational health. Organizational health is a characteristic of many successful businesses and organizations. Leaders can adopt organizational health strategies to transform their own operations and company culture in order to see the same successes that many other healthy organizations do. Through analysis, case studies, and applicable step-by-step explanations, executives and leadership teams can uncover where their own organizational health is lacking and how to improve upon it.

The Advantage divides organizational health into four correlating disciplines: building a cohesive leadership team, creating clarity, overcommunicating clarity, and reinforcing clarity. These disciplines build on each other to create a competitive advantage over businesses and organizations that do not take the time to address problems that they might overcome through better organizational health. Comprehension and application of the four disciplines of organizational health can lead to improvements in various aspects of a business, from strategy and finance to marketing and technology. While being a smart business with deep knowledge of the industry is important, being a healthy business can enable a business to be even smarter. An unhealthy organization can be costly not just to company culture, morale, and operations; it can be financially costly, as well.

A more cohesive leadership team, for example, is open, honest, and allows for vulnerability among members of the team. This leads to constructive conflict and better decision-making and top-down communication with other employees. Creating, overcommunicating, and reinforcing clarity ensures the alignment of a leadership team with the rest of the business. This means better communication, strategy, productivity, and work ethic. With these disciplines in mind, meetings become a vital tool for organizational health.

Patrick Lencioni: Lencioni is the author of the book and has been a business consultant for twenty years, specializing in organizational health. He writes and speaks about these business principles while assisting businesses through his own consultancy firm.

1. Organizational health is a crucial factor in the success of a business or organization, as it ensures a competitive advantage over others.
2. Organizational health offers businesses and organizations a competitive advantage mainly because many other leadership teams ignore its value.
3. While businesses and organizations spend a lot of time on organizational intelligence, they must also be healthy. A healthier business is a smarter business, and the two qualities thus combine to achieve greater success.
4. A cohesive leadership team is essential for ensuring that a business or organization remains competitive against its competition and able to achieve the level of success it is pursuing. Without cohesion, leadership may not be setting a good example for the rest of the employees, and leaders may not make optimal business decisions.
5. If a leadership team understands the answers to six questions about its communicational clarity and acts to implement strategies to optimize it, then it has already taken the most important step needed to secure a competitive advantage through organizational health.
6. Leadership teams must not simply communicate but must overcommunicate the messages and principles of their organization. Despite some leaders hesitance to overcommunicate their messages, it is often necessary to ensure that they are heard, believed, and followed throughout the organization.
7. To set an example for employees, clarity and overcommunication have to be supplemented by reinforced messages that are embedded into the foundation of the business and into every decision that leadership makes.
8. After determining the best practices of the four disciplines of organizational health, meetings become a critical venue for implementing those practices.

Organizational health is a crucial factor in the success of a business or organization, as it ensures a competitive advantage over others.

Analysis

While some business leaders believe that aspects of business such as strategy, finance, or marketing are the keys to success, organizational health may play a much larger role. Organizational health can contribute to the successes of those other aspects of business by providing them with clearer context and arming them with tools for overcoming obstacles. Most important among these tools is better communication. By pursuing the improvement of organizational health, businesses and organizations gain a competitive advantage that enables them to increase efficiency and efficacy of operations while also benefitting company culture and morale.

Achieving a competitive advantage is a top priority for many businesses and organizations of all sizes, especially in industries where the market is saturated with competitors, such as technology, health care, or digital communications. Hoping to boost company morale and productivity, a digital communications firm may have tried improving assorted employee perks and on-site benefits, such as daily catered lunch or a pool table in the break room. However, leaders might grow frustrated if morale and productivity remain low because employees view these added perks as the leaderships attempt to shirk responsibility for deeper problems. Although a digital communications firm, this companys internal communication, particularly between the leadership and employees, might be strained. Employees may feel that memos from management are convoluted with mixed messages, while management believes its employees are not dedicated to their jobs. These are signs of an unhealthy organization that needs to rethink the foundational behaviors and thought processes that regulate its daily procedures and decisions.

Organizational health offers businesses and organizations a competitive advantage mainly because many other leadership teams ignore its value.

Analysis

Despite the advantages of doing so, many businesses do not take advantage of principles for achieving organizational health. Three particular biases tend to prevent businesses and organizations from embracing the strategies behind improving organizational health, despite the benefits. A sophistication bias occurs when leaders believe organizational health is not going to make a significant difference or underestimate its importance because the changes are so simple, straightforward, and obvious. With the adrenaline bias, leaders are so focused on all of the activity going on in their company that they do not stop to address the types of issues that can make an organization unhealthy and dysfunctional. The quantification bias means leaders have a hard time accepting organizational health because the concept is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify with any hard metrics, such as return on investment.