Title: The Advantage: Why Organization Health Trumps
Everything Else in Business
Author: Lencioni, Patrick
Subjects: Organizational Effectiveness; Organization;
Success in Business; Well-being
Call Number: 658.4 L563A 2012
ISBN: 9780470941522
Number of Pages: 216 pages
Book Description:
While too
many leaders are still limiting their search for advantage to conventional and
largely exhausted areas like marketing, strategy, and technology, Lencioni
demonstrates that there is an untapped gold mine sitting right beneath them.
Instead of trying to become smarter, he asserts that leaders and organizations
need to shift their focus to becoming healthier, allowing them to tap into the
more-than-sufficient intelligence and expertise they already have.
Lencioni
draws upon his twenty years of writing, field research, and executive
consulting to some of the world’s leading organizations. He combines real-world
stories and anecdotes with practical, actionable advice to create a work that
is at once a great read and an invaluable, hands-on tool. The result is,
without doubt, Lencioni’s most comprehensive, significant, and essential work
to date. (from the inside of book jacket)
My Read:
“A leadership
team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving
a common objective for their organization.” (Lencioni, p21) How small is the
group? The author suggests between three and twelve people. The moment I read
this definition I know I have to pay attention to what the author delivers for
the messages the author sends might be of help to my workplace.
In the book
the author lists two requirements for success:
Smart: strategy, marketing, finance, and technology
Healthy: minimal
politics, minimal confusion, high morale, high productivity, and low
turnover. For the organization to be healthy, the first and most is trust.
The author states that politics is confusion without trust. This point of view
really is an eye opener to me for I have been searching answers for how to
encourage and inspire people to share the enthusiasm and passion to work hard
at the workplace. It just dawns upon me that if there is no trust among a group
of people, then there is no team at all; the most I would get is a working
group made up of people whose mindset, purpose, goals, attitude, and work
ethics differ and vary, sometimes to the extremely opposite.
The author
lists six questions for leaders to answer to create clarity and build a healthy
organization. The six questions are:
1-Why do we exist?—purpose of the organization
2-How do we behave?—core values for values define a company’s
personality
3-What do we do?—this is an organization’s business definition
4-How will we succeed?—filter and 3 anchors for a company to
be successful
5-What is most important right now?--priorities
6-Who must do what?—task assignment
In addition
to trust which is the basis and foundation for a healthy organization, I found
the following message from the book meaningful and useful. “In fact, gratitude,
recognition, increased responsibilities, and other forms of genuine
appreciation are drivers. That means an employee can never really get enough of
those and will always welcome more.” (Lencioni, p168) “Direct, personal
feedback really is the simplest and most effective form of motivation.”
(lencioni, p167)
The true
cases the author shares with readers in this good book are stories reinforcing
the important points the author is trying to make. Some conversations in these
stories are intriguing and got me wonder what the expressions of those people
involved would look like and the atmosphere in the room the talks took place.
Believe and
trust. Once a person is able to find her values and believe in those values
then a trust is possibly formed.
Reference:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team—Lencioni, Patrick
The Table Group: http://www.tablegroup.com/
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