People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1 - 63

A Must Read

Worthwhile

Skim It Over

Bottom of the Stack

THE ADVANTAGE continued from page 62
Moral: By holding even favored colleagues to their agreed responsibilities, the leader gained credibility, which fostered alignment around
a cultural norm of peer accountability. The ensuing clarity became
contagious, prompting healthier interactions and better performance.
In his tour de force, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps
Everything Else in Business, Patrick Lencioni makes the case for effective organizational functioning in compelling style. Drawing on critical
"moments of truth" from his consulting career, like the story of Fred,
Lencioni illustrates the principles that drive organizational health using
accessible, plain English anecdotes.
Lencioni does not equivocate, stating, "The single greatest advantage
any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by
most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anybody
who wants it."
To achieve health, there are five success factors he holds as critical.
These define the chapter structure: building a cohesive leadership
team; creating clarity; over communicating that clarity; then, reinforcing
that clarity. The fifth chapter puts forward a framework for meetings to
support alignment, including their function, participants, timing,
cadence, and rationale.
As with most research and writing around organizational development,
it's easy to dismiss any such list as obvious, and even trite. But understanding the items is far different than actually performing them. The
latter can be challenging because of the personal discomfort they
prompt.
For example, on the topic of building a cohesive leadership team, five
behaviors are put forward as critical: building trust; mastering conflict;
achieving commitment; embracing accountability; and focusing on
results.
While the book, by design, favors anecdotes to quantitative evidence,
the latter is brought forward in the tea-building chapter to make a strong
point. Based on 12,000 responses to his online group effectiveness
survey of teams, peer accountability-the focus of this review's opening parable-is the hardest. Lencioni writes, "... a full 65% of teams
scored 'red' on accountability-or lowest on [the] three-tiered rating
scale of green-yellow-red. Other red scores for the remaining four
behaviors include trust (40%), conflict (36%), commitment (22%), and
results (27%)."
It may well be that the culture of accountability at the top of the house
sets the tone for the wider organization. Analysis of McKinsey & Co.'s
Organizational Health Index (OHI) conducting more than 1,800 organizational surveys with nearly 2 million responses shows that
management practices that drive accountability, like role clarity and
personal ownership-combine to predict 90% of the health score,
which in turn has been linked to long-term total shareholder return
(TRS) . Considered together with Lencioni's finding that 65% of teams
have trouble with peer accountability, the business benefit of achieving
that alone, as a reliable and repetitive way of working, may draw the
senior leader's interest as a hidden performance differentiator. (It is
likely a necessary but insufficient condition for sustained health over

the long term, though, because although perhaps less challenging, the
other factors are important, too.)
When leaders struggle with confronting peers and direct reports on
behavioral issues, the book notes, they rationalize it with their desire
to be kind. "But an honest reassessment of motivation will allow
them to admit that they are the ones who don't want to feel bad and
that failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness."
Resonant quotes like this suffuse the book. For example, on the topic
of performance management systems, a well-documented source of
pain in many organizations (and what senior leaders often admit are
completely ineffective), "That's why a one-page, customized performance review form that managers embrace and take seriously is
always better than a seven-page, sophisticated one designed by an
organizational psychologist from the National Institute for Human
Transformation and Bureaucracy (there is no such thing)."
Quotes like this, and narrative descriptions that take the reader into
the executive suite, make this a page-turner in a genre not renowned
for easy reading. Every senior leader will benefit from what Lencioni
calls "the Playbook" which is essentially a short document (a few
pages) that codifies the otherwise "invisible" shared assumptions of
the leadership team around the matter of why they exist at all, the
methods by which they believe they will succeed, and the three priorities they commit to apply as criteria in any major decision. It is the
hard discussions that create the document-not the document
itself- that move teams to health. A checklist at the book's end makes
important considerations easy to review, depending on where the team
is on its health journey.
Readers should be cautioned that leading exercises like the ones
described in The Advantage is not for everyone. Serious group dynamics training and senior-level facilitation skills and experience are
required to move smart, driven executives out of their comfort zones
and achieve a constructive outcome. For example, a truth-telling exercise described in a chapter on trust building could go seriously awry
in inexperienced hands. For another, the practitioner who is uncomfortable with pregnant pauses at critical points in a team conflict may
squander real opportunities to get the team to a different (and better)
place.
Finally, the book is packed with practical examples of principles applied
with real teams. As such, it is nine parts recipe, but it is also one part
credo. Practicality does not obviate a crystal-clear viewpoint about the
activities' rationale: "As more and more leaders come to the realization
that the last frontier of competitive advantage will be the transformation of unhealthy organizations into healthy ones, there will be a shift
in the mindset of executives away from more technical pursuits that
can be delegated to others and toward the disciplines outlined in this
book. Whether that takes place over the next five, 10, or 20 years, I
don't know. But it's coming.
For the early adopters of organizational health, the advantages that
they will reap will be amplified as they achieve even greater differentiation from their lagging competitors."

VOLUME 38/ISSUE 1 - 2015

People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1