Patrick M. Lencioni - The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family

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Table of Contents

Also by Patrick Lencioni

Leadership Fables
The Five Temptations of a CEO
The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Death by Meeting
Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job

Field Guide
Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

For you, Laura, for who you are and what you do for all of us. And for mom and dad, for always putting family first.

INTRODUCTION

I need to start this book with two quick confessions. First, I am not a family counselor or therapist, and I dont have a Ph.D. in psychologyor anything else for that matter. Im a management consultant and business author, and more important, a husband and a father of four.

Second, I struggle with many books on family life. Its not that I dont enjoy the subject or find them interesting. Its just that they so often leave me feeling inadequate and overwhelmed by prescribing elaborate systems that can transform my family, as long as my wife and I have four days to invest up front and three hours per week to do follow-up exercises. Which, unfortunately, we dont.

So what prompted me to write this book?

Well, in my work as a consultant, I have frequently found myself in conversations with my clients about their families. I am happy to report that almost all the executives Ive met claim that family is more important to them than work. And most of them seem to really mean it.

However, every one of those executivesincluding the one writing this bookwould have to admit that they spend inordinately more time thinking about, strategizing about, and meeting about how to run their companies than they do their families. And yet they complain that life at home is far too reactive, frantic, and unfocused.

Of course, this makes no sense. Why would intelligent, family-oriented people overinvest in their work and fail to manage the most important organizations in their lives? And why wouldnt they apply any of the tools they use at work to improve the way their families function? I can think of a few reasons.

For one, it might not occur to us that management tools from the workplace can apply at home. We dont think about our families as organizations, and ourselves as the executives of those organizations. Additionally, I think many of us feel a little awkward, even embarrassed, at the thought of having a strategic meeting to talk about family values or strategic priorities. Who does that, anyway?

But more important than all of this, I think we under-manage our families because we take them for granted. Consider this:

Even the least organized among us spends time and energy planning and strategizing about our career, personal finances, and health. Why? Because we all think we might be forced to forfeit those things if we arent purposeful and thoughtful about them. If we arent proactive about managing our work and our career, we might wind up without a job. If we arent strategic about our finances, we could watch our money disappear. And if we arent purposeful about our exercise and diet, our health could fail us.

But when it comes to being purposeful, strategic, and proactive in our family life, we dont really see much risk of loss. Sure, we might have to deal with more stress and exhaustion than wed like, but its not going to threaten the existence of our families. And besides, every other family seems just as frantic as ours. Family chaos is just part of life, and so we accept levels of confusion and disorganization and craziness at home that we would not tolerate at work.

Sadly, its not until people actually have to face the possibility of losing their families (through divorce or substance abuse or other serious behavioral problems) that they finally come to realize that a little planning and strategy would have been worthwhile. But by then theyre spending hours and hours in painful discussions or counseling sessions just trying to recover what theyre on the verge of losing. Which reinforces the importance of the old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Now dont get me wrong. Im not suggesting that families can ever prevent or eliminate chaos and confusion completely from their lives. As long as there are sleepovers and in-laws and book reports and Little League games and proms and college applications and weddings to deal with, we will have unpredictability and craziness in our homes. And thats a good thing, because complete controleven if it were possiblewould not be desirable. Life should be an adventure.

However, if we could achieve a little more sanity in the midst of that adventure, and transform our stressful, reactive, frantic families into more peaceful, proactive, and intentional ones, wouldnt that be worth doing? I certainly think so.

And that is the purpose of this little bookto help you run your family with more clarity and context and purposefulness by provoking you to answer three simple questions that can change your life. I hope you find my ideas helpful and that your family benefits from them in many ways for years to come.

The Fable

PART ONE

The Problem

PROVOCATION

Theresa Cousins had never been so mad at her husband, Jude.

Ironically, the comment that sparked her anger wasnt really directed at her specifically and certainly wasnt meant as criticism. In fact, he said it without malice or emotion.

If my clients ran their companies the way we run this family, theyd be out of business.

That was it.

But as a full-time stay-at-home mom, Theresa couldnt help but feel like the target of the comment. Worse yet, she suspected that Jude might be right.

THERESA

The only sister among three brothers, Theresa Toscana considered herself a little tougher than most of her childhood friends. Receiving a partial scholarship to play volleyball at the University of Notre Dame, she chose mathematics as her major and made extra money by tutoring other athletes who were struggling with their freshman year calculus requirement.

One of those athletes was a tennis player who had a roommate named Jude Cousins, a fellow Californian who wasnt having much trouble with math but did need occasional advice about women. Even after she finished her tutoring assignment with his roommate, Theresa and Jude found excuses to be around each other. The two became friends, though they never dated.

After graduation, Theresa returned to her familys home in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she spent two and a half years in what she referred to as accounting prison, bored to tears doing tax audits for companies that held no interest for her. So she went back to school to become a junior high school math teacher, something she would come to love.

It was during her first year in graduate school that she also reconnected with Jude.

REUNION

Having quickly abandoned his aspirations to be a journalist in Chicago, Jude joined the herds of recent college grads moving west to work in high tech. After finding a job with a growing software company, he quickly began climbing the corporate ladder, or more accurately, being pushed up it by an industry on fire.

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