The Advantage:  Why organizational health trumps everything else in business, by Patrick Lencioni brings together many of the leadership concepts presented in his other books into one handy volume.  This book departs from his usual method of introducing the leadership concepts within a story but rather presents principles that can be readily adapted by an organization.  It’s been said that the “soft side” of leadership is hard and Lencioni presents four simple yet challenging steps from the “soft side” of leadership for developing organizational health:

1. Build a Cohesive Leadership Team – The first step is to enable the leadership team to behave in a functional and cohesive manner. If the people responsible for leading are behaving in dysfunctional ways, then that dysfunction will be reflected in the rest of the organization and disrupt organizational health.

2. Create Clarity – The second step for building organization health is ensuring that the leadership team are in agreement and aligned around six key questions:

2.1 Why do we exist?

2.2 How do we behave?

2.3 What do we do?

2.4 How will we succeed?

2.5 What is most important right now?

2.6 Who must do what?

 Leaders need to be clear and in alignment on these questions so that people in the organization have clarity about what they should do to make the organization successful.

3. Over-Communicate Clarity – After these first two steps are in process then the organization needs to: over-communicate answers to the six questions.  Leaders of healthy organizations constantly reinforce what is true and important. They err on saying too much, rather than too little. Lencioni believes this quality sets leaders of healthy organizations apart from others.

4. Reinforce Clarity – Finally, leaders must ensure that the answers to the six critical questions are consistently reinforced.  Therefore any process that involves people (e.g. hiring and firing, performance management, and decision-making) is designed to intentionally support and emphasize the values of the organization.

Lencioni also adds a chapter entitled “The Centrality of Great Meetings”.  He writes, “If someone were to offer me one single piece of evidence to evaluate the health of an organization, I would want to observe the leadership team during a meeting” (p. 174).  He presents an excellent strategy for conducting productive meetings by creating greater focus to meetings by separating the tactical and strategic decisions.

I highly recommend this book to anyone in a leadership role.  Colleen Barrett, president emeritus of Southwest Airlines sums it up well, “The Advantage has more common sense in its 200 pages than I have ever found in a business book.  A must-read.”  Patrick Lencioni will be presenting topics from The Advantage at the Global Leadership Summit on August 9-10 2012.  Columbia International University is a host site and you may register at http://www.willowcreek.com/events/leadership/.

RickAssociate Pastor – Discipleship.  The Church at LifePark

Professor of Discipleship, Columbia International University

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