Click here to return to Blog Post Intro
Organizations will know they have found organizational health when they have minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees which is a direct result of the organization being whole, consistent, and complete and when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.
Lencioni offers the Four Discipline Model to build and maintains organizational health:
Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
The process of organization health begins with creating a strong and cohesive leadership team. The team should not be too big—no more than nine people—and each leader should acknowledge that their organization unit is part of a greater good so that individual units are neither favored nor ignored.
While the word “team” is probably over-used, you cannot underestimate the importance of teamwork. Teams are stronger than their members individually are—since they combine all their solo abilities in a cohesive circle.
These behavioral principles are fundamental to effective teamwork:
- Building trust.
- Mastering conflict.
- Achieving commitment.
- Embracing accountability.
- Focusing on results.
Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements:
- The leadership team is small enough (three to ten people) to be effective.
- Members of the team trust one another and can be genuinely vulnerable with each other.
- Team members regularly engage in productive, unfiltered conflict around important issues.
- The team leaves meetings with clear-cut, active, specific agreements around decisions.
- Team members hold one another accountable to commitments and behaviors.
- Members of the leadership team are focused on team number one. They put the collective priorities and needs of the larger organization ahead of their own departments.
Discipline 2: Create Clarity
To create clarity, the leadership team should answer 6 simple but critical questions for all decisions, goals, and tasks:
1. Why do we exist?
Ask, “How do we contribute to a better world?” Then, ask Why? Until the answer falls just short of “To make a better world.” The answer should ultimately be a clear, straight-forward one-sentence definition that grandma can understand.
The Leadership Team needs to agree on a set of core values, which provide the ultimate guide for employee behavior at all levels. Following core values will enable the organization to naturally attract the right employees and repel the wrong ones. Separating core from aspirational values can be done by asking the questions, “Is this trait inherent and natural for us, and has it been apparent in the organization for a long time? Or, is it something that we have to work hard to cultivate?” A core value will have been apparent for a long time and requires little intentional provocation.
Once the organization identifies its reason for existing and core values, the Leadership Team should define 3 Strategic Anchors. Three is almost always the right number of filters that an organization should establish to make their decision-making as intentional as possible. Strategic Anchors should be agile enough to change whenever the organization’s competitive landscape shifts and market conditions call for a different approach.
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed? (Organization Strategy = Plan for Success)
5. What is most important, right now?
Most organizations have too many top priorities to achieve the level of focus they need to succeed. Wanting to cover all their bases, they establish a long list of disparate objectives and spread their scarce time, energy, and resources across them all. The result is almost always a lot of initiatives being done in a mediocre way and a failure to accomplish what matters most.
Every organization, if it wants to create a sense of alignment and focus, must have a single top priority within a given period of time or “Thematic Goal” that meets the following characteristics:
- Singular: One thing has to be most important, even if there are other worthy goals under consideration.
- Qualitative: The thematic goal should almost never be established with specific numbers attached to it. The opportunity for putting quantitative measures around a thematic goal comes later, and it should not be done too early because it can too narrowly prescribe what needs to be achieved and limit people’s ability to rally around it.
- Temporary: A thematic goal must be achievable within a clear time boundary, almost always between three and twelve months. Anything shorter than three months feels like a fire drill, and anything longer than twelve invites procrastination and skepticism about whether the goal will endure.
- Shared across the leadership team: When executives agree on their top priority, they must take collective responsibility for achieving it, even if it seems that the nature of the goal falls within one or two of the executives’ regular areas of ownership.
The best way to identify a thematic goal is to answer the question, “If we accomplish only one thing during the next [#] months, what would it be?”
The primary purpose of the thematic goal is not necessarily to rally all the troops within the organization, as helpful as that may seem. More than anything else, it is to provide the leadership team itself with clarity around how to spend its time, energy, resources. Therefore, the thematic goal must become the collective responsibility of the leadership team.
The Leadership Team should then work to flesh out on a single sheet of paper the thematic goal along with its defining objectives, so leaders have the clear focus they need to align their actions and avoid distraction. This thematic goal and plan should live for 3–12 months.
6. Who must do what?
The fact is, every organization of any size needs some division of labor, and that begins at the very top. Without clarity around that division of labor, the potential for politics and infighting, even among well-intentioned people, is great.
If members of a leadership team can rally around clear answers to these six fundamental questions—without using jargon—they will drastically increase the likelihood of creating a healthy organization.
Here’s an example of a “Playbook” from Lighthouse Consulting:
- Why do we exist? We exist because we believe the world needs more great leaders.
- How do we behave? We behave with passion, humility, and emotional intelligence.
- What do we do? We provide services and resources for leaders who want to make their organizations more effective.
- How will we succeed? We will differentiate ourselves by providing extremely high-touch service, staying relatively small and protecting our unique culture, and leveraging the ideas of world-class subject matter experts.
Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements:
- Members of the leadership team know, agree on, and are passionate about the reason that the organization exists.
- The leadership team has clarified and embraced a small, specific set of behavioral values.
- Leaders are clear and aligned around a strategy that helps them define success and differentiate from competitors.
- The leadership team has a clear, current goal around which they rally. They feel a collective sense of ownership for that goal.
- Members of the leadership team understand one another’s roles and responsibilities. They are comfortable asking questions about one another’s work.
- The elements of the organization’s clarity are concisely summarized and regularly referenced and reviewed by the leadership team.
Discipline 3 – Overcommunicate Clarity
Every decision, no matter how large or small, needs to be determined by the leadership team and then communicated very clearly and effectively to the rest of the team as a cascading communication effect. This communication then should be reiterated over and over and over again.
It’s been said 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.
Great leaders see themselves as “Chief Reminding Officers” as much as anything else.
There are three keys to cascading communication:
- Message consistency from one leader to another
- Timeliness of delivery
- Live, real-time communication
Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements:
- The leadership team has clearly communicated the six aspects of clarity to all employees.
- Team members regularly remind the people in their departments about those aspects of clarity.
- The team leaves meetings with clear and specific agreements about what to communicate to their employees, and they cascade those messages quickly after meetings.
- Employees are able to accurately articulate the organization’s reason for existence, values, strategic anchors, and goals.
Discipline 4 –Reinforce Clarity
Healthy organizations believe that performance management is almost exclusively about eliminating confusion. They realize that most of their employees want to succeed, and that the best way to allow them to do that is to give them clear direction, regular information about how they’re doing, and access to the coaching they need.
What leaders need to understand is that the vast majority of employees, at all levels of an organization, see financial rewards as a satisfier, not a driver. That means they want to receive enough compensation to make them feel good about their job, but additional money doesn’t yield proportionate increases in their job satisfaction. In fact, gratitude, recognition, increased responsibilities, and other forms of genuine appreciation are drivers. An employee can never really get enough of those & will always welcome more.
Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements:
- The organization has a simple way to ensure that new hires are carefully selected based on the company’s values.
- New people are brought into the organization by thoroughly teaching them about the six elements of clarity.
- Managers throughout the organization have a simple, consistent, and nonbureaucratic system for setting goals and reviewing progress with employees. That system is customized around the elements of clarity.
- Employees who don’t fit the values are managed out of the organization. Poor performers who do fit the values are given the coaching and assistance they need to succeed.
- Compensation and reward systems are built around the values and goals of the organization.
Four Types of Meetings Vital for Maintaining Progress in the Right Direction
Most organizations don’t hold enough effective meetings. There are four types of meetings every organization should hold.
1. Daily Check-in Meetings (Administrative)
These are 5-10 minute meetings that involve little to no problem solving. Their most powerful impact is the quick resolution of minor issues that might otherwise fester and create unnecessary busywork for the team.
When teams members don’t see each other more than once a week, they try to resolve endless administrative issues that surface every day with an e-mail here and a voice mail there and a hallway conversation in between. That sets off a flurry of more e-mails, voice mails, and hallway stops as the situation changes and more people on the team need or want to be looped in.
How much time and energy do we spend chasing down issues that could be sorted out in a thirty-second conversation if everyone were in the same room for a few minutes every day?
A big part of the beauty of the daily check-in is that leaders know they’re going to see their colleagues within twenty-four hours, so rather than firing off an e-mail or a voice mail or interrupting someone in the course of their day, they simply make a note to bring up a small issue at the next day’s meeting.
2. Weekly Staff Meetings (Tactical)
Do you dread the Weekly Staff Meetings? These are often “Meeting Stew” – a combination of administrative issues, tactical decisions, creative brainstorming, strategic analysis, and personnel discussions into one exhausting meeting.
To be more effective, convene 45-90 minute meetings that are focused, using the six questions as a framework or guide:
- Why do we exist?
- How do we behave?
- What do we do?
- How will we succeed?
- What is most important, right now?
- Who must do what?
As a Leadership Team, create the agenda together. Spend the first ten minutes creating a real-time agenda. The Leader goes around the room and ask every member of the team to take thirty seconds to report on the two or three key activities that they believe are their top priorities for the week.
Then, review the one-page scorecard that the team created—the one that includes the thematic goal, defining objectives, and standard operating objectives.
Address the question, “What is most important, right now?” It should take a team only five or ten minutes to go through the items on their scorecard, assigning a stoplight color (red/yellow/green) to each item. This process will enable the team to avoid the all-too-common problem of sitting through a discussion of something that everyone knows is of little importance to the organization.
3. Adhoc Topical Meetings (Strategic)
This is probably the most interesting and compelling of all meetings. Its purpose is to dig into the critical issues that can have a long-term impact on an organization or that require significant time and energy to resolve, including:
- Major competitive threat
- Disruptive industry change
- Substantial shift in revenue
- Significant product or service deficiency
- Troubling drop in morale
Leadership teams rarely carve out enough time for these important discussions. Instead, they try to resolve important issues in fifteen-minute increments in between more tactical and administrative topics during a staff meeting.
What leadership teams need to do—and this may be the single most important piece of advice for them when it comes to meetings—is separate their tactical conversations from their strategic ones. Combining the two just doesn’t work and leaves both sets of issues inadequately addressed.
Effective Adhoc Topical Meetings are scheduled for 2 to 4 hours, and the Leadership Team not only covers critical information but also solves problems together.
4. Quarterly Off-Site Review Meetings (Developmental)
Leadership Teams should take 1-2 days each quarter to re-center around the 6 questions and reiterate/reinforce their key goals and aspirations. The focus is all about stepping back from the business (often referred to as a “Retreat”) to get a fresh perspective to address the following:
- Review the organization’s strategic anchors and thematic goal
- Assess the performance of key employees
- Discuss industry changes and competitive threats
- Review the behaviors of team members to evaluate cohesiveness
Doing this four times a year that makes sense. More frequently than that doesn’t give a team enough time to make progress on critical issues and identify meaningful trends in the market or in the company. Less frequently usually means that people are going to forget about what they talked about at the previous meeting, which makes continuity difficult and progress unlikely.
Meeting Checklist
Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered meetings when they can affirm the following statements:
- Tactical and strategic discussions are addressed in separate meetings.
- During tactical staff meetings, agendas are set only after the team has reviewed its progress against goals. Noncritical administrative topics are easily discarded.
- During topical meetings, enough time is allocated to major issues to allow for clarification, debate, and resolution.
- The team meets quarterly away from the office to review what is happening in the industry, in the organization, and on the team.
Seizing the Advantage
If your team has one common goal and purpose, and they all work toward it together, they’ll be more in sync and much stronger as an organization.
There is just no escaping the fact that the single biggest factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier—or not—is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the person in charge.
May you take to heart the Four Disciplines of The Advantage, as you & your team shoot for the stars!