Thoughts on “The Advantage” by Patrick Lencioni

In general I’m not a huge fan of business-related books as I tend to only find time for reading at the end of the day at which point my brain is done thinking about work and just wants to relax with something relatively mindless and not heavily thought-provoking.  That said, a group of colleagues at Fueled were tasked with reading The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni so like it or not my evening brain had work to do which means it was heavily biased to not like this book.  So I started reading this book biased towards thinking it would be worthless and annoying as just another business book in a long line of ones from folks pushing “expert advice” who assume their small sample size of experience could apply to the population of all our shared work experiences.  Tough crowd, I know.

Somewhere along the way, though, the book managed to overcome at least some of that skepticism.  I still think Lencioni leans too heavily on anecdotes and makes some claims about “organizational health” that are difficult to substantiate or measure.  Even so, there are quite a few ideas here that I found immediately useful; namely that leadership teams need trust and productive conflict, clarity matters more than cleverness, making a decision is usually better than waiting for certainty, accountability needs to actually be visible, and important messages need to be repeated far more often than most leaders probably think is necessary.

So this isn’t really intended as a book review or even a proper summary.  It’s closer to my annotated notebook from reading it, including the parts I agreed with, the parts I questioned, and the occasional part that made me roll my eyes.  What follows are the bits that I highlighted along the way and my thoughts on those passages.  My hope is that the process of reading, highlighting, notating, and sharing my thoughts here will impart some useful wisdom to long-term memory and benefit from one of these nuggets popping into my brain at some future moment.  :crossed-fingers:

The Case for Organizational Health

“A good way to recognize health is to look for the signs that indicate an organization has it. These include minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees.” (page 26)

I’ve worked in plenty organizations where this was definitely not the overall employee experience, unfortunately very few places where this was the norm.  If you find yourself in this sort of work environment, think long and hard before leaving.

“Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health.

Studying spreadsheets and Gantt charts and financial statements is relatively safe and predictable, which most executives prefer. That’s how they’ve been trained, and that’s where they’re comfortable. What they usually want to avoid at all costs are subjective conversations that can easily become emotional and awkward. And organizational health is certainly fraught with the potential for subjective and awkward conversations.

That’s why so many leaders, even when they acknowledge the pain that politics and confusion are causing their organizations, continue to spend their time tweaking the dials in more traditional disciplines. Unfortunately, the opportunities for improvement and competitive advantage they find in those areas are incremental and fleeting at best.” (page 27)

Pushing back on this a bit, because part of the reason “the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health” and its “subjective and awkward conversations” is that you can’t readily measure change on something that’s subjective.  Best case scenario here is you’re polling your company on employee net promoter scores (or something similar) and theoretically link the changes in eNPS to organizational health even though changes that impact organizational health are at best correlated and not causal (barring folks providing text feedback in an eNPS and you can more clearly see causal evidence for improvement in scores).

“The truth of the matter was that those companies weren’t smarter than their competitors; they simply tapped into the adequate intelligence they had and didn’t allow dysfunction, ego, and politics to get in the way.” (page 31)

“The healthier an organization is, the more of its intelligence it is able to tap into and use. Most organizations exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them. But the healthy ones tap into almost all of it. That, as much as anything else, is why they have such an advantage over their unhealthy competitors.” (page 32)

Its not immediately clear what being “healthy” has to do with accessing and maximizing intelligence, knowledge, experience, or intellectual capital nor does the remainder of the book really answer that.  So I’m filing these sections under U for “unsubstantiated flourish“.

“Another reason that organizational health has been overlooked by academia and the media has to do with the difficulty of measuring its impact. As I mentioned earlier, trying to identify exactly how much a company’s health affects its bottom line is next to impossible; there are just too many variables to isolate it from the myriad of other factors. But again, that doesn’t make the impact of organizational health any less real, just harder for journalists and academics to justify in a definitive, quantitative way.” (page 32)

Ugh, ok so this validates my comment further up from earlier in the book.  Whether I like it or not, a mantra from my early career training at GE pops into my head: you can’t manage what you can’t measure.  So, ok, fine we want to try and improve things that we can’t measure actual improvement, but then let’s be more precise and say this is “how I think a company should be run because its what I think works” and not “organizational health.”

“The financial cost of having an unhealthy organization is undeniable: wasted resources and time, decreased productivity, increased employee turnover, and customer attrition. The money an organization loses as a result of these problems, and the money it has to spend to recover from them, is staggering.” (page 33)

Aha, ok, now we’re talking about stuff we can measure, fantastic!  I’d be fine with some sort of executive scorecard labeled “organizational health” that includes these items with whatever reasonable measures are in place to track their net change over time.  If you’re able to track that down into different parts of the organization where different changes are put into place, then great maybe we can start to talk about causal impact then.

The Four Disciplines Model

“In addition to being behaviorally cohesive, the leadership team of a healthy organization must be intellectually aligned and committed to the same answers to six simple but critical questions. There can be no daylight between leaders around these fundamental issues.” (page 36)

I’ll help everyone out, because these don’t really come until Discipline 2’s section on “Create Clarity”.  Here are those six questions: why do we exist?  how do we behave?  what do we do?  how will we succeed?  what is most important now?  who must do what? The answers to those questions for the orgs playbook for purpose, values, business definition, strategy, immediate priority, and leadership responsibilities (respectively).

“When it comes to reinforcing clarity, there is no such thing as too much communication.” (page 37)

Agreed, over-communicate and you’ll maybe, slowly get the impression that people are listening to you.

“When an organization’s leaders are cohesive, when they are unambiguously aligned around a common set of answers to a few critical questions, when they communicate those answers again and again and again, and when they put effective processes in place to reinforce those answers, they create an environment in which success is almost impossible to prevent.” (page 37)

Feels straightforward; agree on some common topics, communicate them ad nauseam in a similar manner, rinse repeat.

DISCIPLINE 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team

“Advocacy is the kind of communication that most people are accustomed to, and it is all about stating your case or making your point. I think we should change our advertising approach. Or, I recommend that we cut costs.

Inquiry is rarer and more important than advocacy. It happens when people ask questions to seek clarity about another person’s statement of advocacy. Why do you think the advertising approach is wrong? And which aspects of it are you referring to? Or, What evidence do you have that our expenses are too high? And how certain are you of this?“” (page 42)

It used to drive me nuts and make me think that folks were lazy who asked questions back in leadership group conversations.  I can see now that some were purely curious and inquiring to learn other perspectives more deeply.

“The kind of trust that is necessary to build a great team is what I call vulnerability-based trust. This is what happens when members get to a point where they are completely comfortable being transparent, honest, and naked with one another, where they say and genuinely mean things like “I screwed up,” “I need help,” “Your idea is better than mine,” “I wish I could learn to do that as well as you do,” and even, “I’m sorry.”” (page 48)

I’d love this reference a lot more if it didn’t make use of the word “naked.”

“In particular, we have them say where they were born, how many siblings they have, where they fall in the order of children, and finally, what the most interesting or difficult challenge was for them as a kid. Again, we’re not interested in their inner childhoods, just what was uniquely challenging for them growing up.” (page 49)

“This inevitably leads to a newly found sense of respect because of the admiration that comes when someone realizes that one of their peers endured and overcame a hardship or accomplished something remarkable. More important, team members begin the process of getting comfortable with vulnerability when they realize that it is okay, even gratifying, to tell their peers something about themselves that they had never mentioned or been asked about before.” (page 49)

“At the heart of the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.” (page 53)

Helping to get team members more vulnerable with one another is definitely useful, having more personal context for others on a team provides perspective when one might otherwise assume negative intent.

“When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer.” (page 58)

“One of the best ways for leaders to raise the level of healthy conflict on a team is by mining for conflict during meetings.” (page 64)

“Another tool for increasing conflict is something I refer to as real-time permission. The idea here is that people need to get immediate feedback, the positive kind, when they start to try out this approach to conflict.” (page 64)

I’ve tried to nudge that along in my team conversations after making a suggestion of my own to ask “ok now tell me why I’m an idiot and that’s a bad idea” which usually gets a few smirks but also occasionally some pushback that otherwise may have been held silent.

“Great teams avoid the consensus trap by embracing a concept that Intel, the legendary microchip manufacturer, calls “disagree and commit.” Basically they believe that even when people can’t come to an agreement around an issue, they must still leave the room unambiguously committed to a common course of action. Most executives who hear about this disagree-and-commit philosophy are immediately convinced that it is something they want.” (page 66)

“Disagree and commit” is also a concept in-use within the WordPress project and while its no fun being on the “disagree” end of this, having a group agreement that still finds a way forward is extremely helpful to keep things moving instead of stuck in analysis paralysis forever.

“That’s because peer-to-peer accountability is the primary and most effective source of accountability on the leadership team of a healthy organization. Most people assume that the leader of an executive team should be the primary source of accountability—and that’s the norm in most unhealthy organizations—but it isn’t efficient or practical, and it makes little sense.

When members of a team go to their leader whenever they see a peer deviate from a commitment that was made, they create a perfect environment for distraction and politics. Colleagues start to wonder who ratted them out, they get resentful of one another, and the team leader finds herself being constantly pulled into situations that could be more quickly and productively solved without her.

When team members know that their colleagues are truly committed to something, they can confront one another about issues without fearing defensiveness or backlash. After all, they’re merely helping someone get back on track or seeking clarity about something that doesn’t seem right. And the person being questioned about her behavior or performance will be willing to admit that she has inadvertently lost her way—after all, she’s vulnerable—and adjust her behavior accordingly.” (page 71)

“At its core, accountability is about having the courage to confront someone about their deficiencies and then to stand in the moment and deal with their reaction, which may not be pleasant.” (page 74)

Surprisingly hard for adults to have an adult conversation, perhaps afraid of confrontation, but all would be easier in the end with more direct, radical candor.

“The irony of all this is that the only way for a team to develop a true culture of peer-to-peer accountability is for the leader to demonstrate that she is willing to confront difficult situations and hold people accountable herself. That’s right. The leader of the team, though not the primary source of accountability, will always be the ultimate arbiter of it. If she is reluctant to play that role—if she is a wuss who constantly balks when it’s time to call someone on their behavior or performance—then the rest of the team is not going to do their part. This makes sense. Why would a team member want to confront a colleague about an issue when the team leader isn’t willing to and is probably going to let them off the hook anyway?

So—and here is the irony—the more comfortable a leader is holding people on a team accountable, the less likely she is to be asked to do so. The less likely she is to confront people, the more she’ll be called on to do it by subordinates who aren’t willing to do her dirty work for her. I know this because I struggle with holding people accountable, and I am fully aware that the reluctance of my staff members to do so with one another is a simple function of my behavior. (I’m working on it.)” (page 73)

“Many leaders who struggle with this (again, I’m one of them) will try to convince themselves that their reluctance is a product of their kindness; they just don’t want to make their employees feel bad. But an honest reassessment of their 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.” (page 75)

Early in my career I worked for an exec who believed in “praise in public, correct in private” (or some such similar phrase), but the problem with that is that many folks never knew that corrections were being addressed privately and assumed that there was zero accountability.  So some initial correction can be helpful in public so others can see the accountability starting and then following up privately with more specifics and coaching guidance.

“I’m often asked whether leaders should hold their people accountable privately during one-on-one sessions or in more public forums with the whole team, like during meetings. Although every case is a little different, generally I believe that on cohesive teams, accountability is best handled with the entire team. I say this because when leaders and team members call one another on issues in front of team members, they get benefits that don’t occur when it takes place individually.

First, when accountability is handled during a meeting, every member of the team receives the message simultaneously and doesn’t have to make the same mistakes in order to learn the lesson of the person being held accountable. Second, they know that the leader is holding their colleague accountable, which avoids their wondering whether the boss is doing his job. Finally, it serves to reinforce the culture of accountability, which increases the likelihood that team members will do the same for one another. When leaders—and peers—limit their accountability discussions to private conversations, they leave people wondering whether those discussions are happening. This often leads to unproductive hallway conversations and conjecture about who knows what about whom.” (page 80)

Aha, ok, yes I’m in total agreement here!

DISCIPLINE 2: Create Clarity

“Thinking they’re being mature, leaders often agree to disagree with one another around seemingly minor issues, thereby avoiding what they see as unnecessary contentiousness and conflict. After all, from their vantage point, the gaps in their opinions and decisions seem small and innocuous. What they don’t understand is that by failing to eliminate even those small gaps, they are leaving employees below them to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with their peers in other departments.” (page 91)

This feels at contrast to the concept of “disagree and commit” which while popularized elsewhere is put into use within the WordPress project.  It can be painful when you’re on the disagreeing side to have to give in and commit to the larger will of the group, it at no worse keeps things moving along instead of grinding down progress such that nothing happens.

“Plenty of euphemisms attest to this idea that implementation science is more important than decision science. One I heard years ago comes from the military: a plan is better than no plan. And it was General Patton who once said, “A good plan violently executed today is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” Those adages attest to something I’ve seen among too many leadership teams: a simple failure to achieve clarity because executives are waiting for perfection.” (page 94)

“It’s just to say that waiting for clear confirmation that a decision is exactly right is a recipe for mediocrity and almost a guarantee of eventual failure. That’s because organizations learn by making decisions, even bad ones. By being decisive, leaders allow themselves to get clear, immediate data from their actions. As a result, they are often able to change course and defeat their indecisive competitors who, while congratulating themselves for not making a mistake, are too mired in theoretical analysis paralysis to rally around any clear plan.” (page 97)

Ah yes, the ever-popular “perfect is the enemy of good“; I totally agree here.  Make a decision and move on.  If additional information comes up such that you need to adjust course again, then do so.  But analysis paralysis be gone!

“When leaders who adopt too many values finally realize what they’ve done and that there is no hope for actually putting their many values to practical use, they often end up ignoring them altogether.” (page 109)

My goodness, the effort to adopt “too many values” does not feel like I road I want to walk down.  Keep it simple, stupid!

“Unlike a company’s reason for existing and core values, which never change, and the business definition, which changes fairly infrequently, an organization’s strategic anchors should change whenever its competitive landscape shifts and market conditions call for a different approach.” (page 129)

Ok, sure, noted.

“Many leadership teams struggle with not wanting to walk away from opportunities that seem basically good and easily justifiable outside the context of having a strategy, but which would distract the organization and pull it away from its stated intent. Strategic anchors give a leadership team the clarity and courage to overcome these distractions and stay on course.” (page 131)

Come on folks, let’s keep our focus (plus hey who doesn’t like having less things to do anyway).  Do simple better.

““If everything is important, nothing is.”” (page 132)

Put it on the quote board.

“Regardless of how it is communicated within the larger organization, it’s worth repeating that every thematic goal must become the collective responsibility of the leadership team. This is true even if the goal doesn’t seem to directly involve the departments that some of those executives lead.” (page 136)

“On a cohesive team, leaders are not there simply to represent the departments that they lead and manage but rather to solve problems that stand in the way of achieving success for the whole organization. That means they’ll readily offer up their departments’ resources when it serves the greater good of the team, and they’ll take an active interest in the thematic goal regardless of how closely related it is to their functional area. And while individual team members will certainly have expertise and responsibility in different parts of the business, they will not limit their input and participation to those areas alone.” (page 137)

“The benefits of establishing an overarching thematic goal are enormous. Divisional rivalry and infighting become much less likely as leaders stop seeing their primary responsibility as solely running their own departments. Focus during meetings gets easier as unimportant and ancillary topics are guiltlessly cast aside. Paralysis around resource allocation can be broken due to clarity around what deserves the most energy and attention. And the need to referee political battles, not only at the executive level but deeper in the organization, diminishes greatly as people better understand the trade-offs that need to be made and the rationale for them.” (page 137)

This really details a “team” environment, which can take some getting used to when one might otherwise just want to focus on their own division’s goals; however, keeping focused on the overall organizations goals and not just aligning to but working towards them best sets teams up for success.

“Defining objectives are the general categories of activity required to achieve the thematic goal. Like the thematic goal, defining objectives must be qualitative, temporary, and shared by the leadership team. They provide a level of specificity so that the thematic goal isn’t merely a slogan but rather a specific and understandable call to action. In most cases, there are between four and six defining objectives, depending on the nature of the goal itself.” (page 138)

“Once teams identify their defining objectives, they have to take on the next, and last, step in the thematic goal process: identifying their standard operating objectives. These are the ongoing and relatively straightforward metrics and areas of responsibility that any leadership team must maintain in order to keep the organization afloat. I like to refer to these responsibilities as the “leaders’ day jobs.”” (page 140)

“It’s important to note that sometimes a company’s thematic goal will be one of the items that appears on its standard operating list.” (page 141)

“That’s not to say that most thematic goals come from the standard list, just that it is sometimes what is called for. And, of course, once the thematic goal has been achieved, the item goes back on the standard list.” (page 141)

Ok, got it, I think.  In any case, noted for future reference.

DISCIPLINE 3: Overcommunicate Clarity

“I’ve heard claims that employees won’t believe what leaders are communicating to them until they’ve heard it seven times. Whether the real number is five, seven, or seventy-seven, the point is that people are skeptical about what they’re being told unless they hear it consistently over time.” (page 153)

“The only way for people to embrace a message is to hear it over a period of time, in a variety of different situations, and preferably from different people.” (page 154)

“Repetition is more than just a matter of communicating something again and again in the same way. Effective communication requires that key messages come from different sources and through various channels, using a variety of tools.” (page 155)

Similarly I recall early on in parenting reading that you had to feed a kid something 15 times for them to “like” it, so repeating meals that my kids rejected time and time again felt like Sisyphus pushing Chef Boyardee meatballs up a hill of green beans.  In practice though, that repetition did help turn our kids into (knock on wood) non-picky eaters.  Seems the same is true repetition-wise in getting an organization to understand and act upon stated goals.

“I remember the day that the woman who headed HR in Australia called her colleague in Germany to tell him about something her boss had just told her that was happening at corporate. Shocked, her German colleague said, “Hey, my boss just told me the same thing!” They felt a greater sense of alignment because of that one simple instance of consistent, informal messaging than they did after receiving any of the other more produced forms of communication.” (page 157)

There are several “examples” in this book that sound absolutely fabricated, this being one of them.  I’d be more convinced on a topic without even partially fabricated examples and more in explaining the hows/whys/etc around it instead.  :eyeroll:

“What I will say is that the reason most organizations fail to communicate to employees is not that they don’t know how to build an intranet site or write a blog or design a PowerPoint presentation, but that they don’t achieve clarity around key messages and stick with them. The world is full of organizations where employees feel uninformed and in the dark even though they have access to more glossy newsletters, interactive Web sites, and overly produced employee meetings than they need or want. What they don’t get is consistent, authentic, and relevant communication.” (page 161)

Ok, we get it, repeat the message.  Repeat the message again.  Repeat the message until you’re certain people are tired of hearing you say the same damn thing over and over.  And then repeat the message some more.

DISCIPLINE 4: Reinforce Clarity

“The fact is that the best human systems are often the simplest and least sophisticated ones. Their primary purpose is not to avoid lawsuits or emulate what other companies are doing but rather to keep managers and employees focused on what the organization believes is important. 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).” (page 167)

My high school math teacher and wrestling coach, Glenn Hyman, had a phrase during wrestling practice that’s stuck with me: “do more of less.”  Which meant don’t try and learn every wrestling move so you could potentially surprise an opponent with something new or be able to counter every possible situation, but instead focus on a couple key items and practice them so much they become second nature.  So the “do more” is the heavy repetition and practice and the “of less” is not trying to learn everything but narrowing it down to a very small subset.  This worked great for me as a wrestler and is something I try and remind myself when I look around my office and house and see too many started projects and not as many finished projects.

Also, see the reference a bit above of Joe Maddon’s “do simple better.”

“Keeping a relatively strong performer who is not a cultural fit creates a variety of problems. Most important of all, it sends a loud and clear message to employees that the organization isn’t all that serious about what it says it believes. Tolerating behavior that flies in the face of core values inspires cynicism and becomes almost impossible to reverse over time. When leaders take the difficult step of letting a strong performer go because of a values mismatch, they not only send a powerful message about their commitment to their values, they also usually find that the performance of the remaining employees improves because they are no longer being stifled by the behavior of their former colleague.” (page 181)

This is a bit of “your values show most during difficult times,” if you say something is a value then stand up and make the hard, adult, professional decision to back those values.  Anything less sows discord.

Checklists for future reference

The following sections are more for my future reference, but I’m sharing them here for others looking to try out the concepts from building an organization following Patrick Lencioni’s four disciplines model towards organizational health.

My takeaways

I started The Advantage expecting another business book full of tidy anecdotes and advice presented as more universally applicable than it probably is.  There’s still some of that here, and I remain skeptical of treating “organizational health” as a thing an organization can meaningfully improve without finding ways to measure whether those changes are actually working.  In the end, I highlighted considerably more than I expected.

The ideas I’m most likely to carry forward are also the simplest ones: build enough trust that people can disagree honestly, ask questions before assuming intent, make decisions and adjust when new information arrives, hold one another accountable, keep the organization focused on a small number of important things, and communicate those things until you’re absolutely sick of hearing yourself say them.

There’s a common thread through most of that which probably resonates with me more than Lencioni’s broader concept of organizational health: do simple better.  None of these ideas are especially complicated.  The hard part is consistently doing them, particularly when the conversations become uncomfortable or the easier option is to avoid them.

So, somewhat annoyingly given the attitude I had when I started reading it, I’m glad I read the book.  I don’t buy every argument Lencioni makes, but there’s enough here that I expect a few of these ideas will pop back into my head when I need them.  Which, conveniently, was the whole point of writing all of this down in the first place.