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How To Improve Their Organizational Health

Organizational health is a phrase that refers to the way an institution's components fit together, such as culture, strategy, operations, and management. These components must all fit together in order for the institution to function as a whole in a clear and consistent way. In this book, written by Patrick Lecioni, readers will learn about the four separate disciplines that business leaders can utilize in order to improve their organizational health while building a solid foundation for success.

When a business or institution uses organizational health to function, they will see a higher morale among coworkers and higher productivity. Organizational health can be described as the glue that holds all pieces of an organization carefully together. When a company experiences an unhealthy organization, it will be plagued with confusion, politics, and high staff turnover.

Most leaders will always agree that in order to run a successful company, organizational health is 100% vital. However, many leaders do not focus on this aspect of management. Instead, they focus on different areas, such as the strategies needed for finance, technology, and marketing. While they may be focusing on important and urgent projects, they often leave behind what is most important to the health of their company. In order to enjoy a company that runs efficiently, this practice must be put to use.

The Advantage offers a highly insightful and perceptive look into the importance of organizational health which should always be a top priority and objective of any business or company. Lencioni provides very clear advice on how to achieve it using clear, concrete steps.

Learn To Create A Healthy Company

• What organizational health really looks like
• How to evaluate the health of your organization
• How to create a more cohesive leadership team
• How to create, communicate and reinforce clarity
• Create a cohesive leadership team of no more than 9 people who are willing to work together without favoring any one department over another
• Make every decision with the leadership team and communicate the decision clearly and repeatedly through the organization
• Make organizational meetings more effective rather than scattershot time wasting
• Hire people who fit into the desired future state of organizational health

The Advantage Book Summary

In this book from leadership and organizational health guru Patrick Lencioni, Lencioni lays out a model for understanding and achieving organizational health, starting at the top of the organization. The first principle is to ensure that there is a cohesive leadership team who are all dedicated to the overall success of the organization, rather than fighting one another to make their individual departments succeed at the expense of others. Another amazing book on this is written by a legendary basketball coach is Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization.

The second principle is to create clarity for the leadership team. Lencioni lays out six key questions every leadership team must answer and use to define their decision making on future topics:

1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important, right now? and
6. Who must do what?

With the answers to these questions defined, Lencioni says that it will be easier for the leadership team to come to agreement on future decisions as they consider everything through the lens of the organization's overall health.

The third principle is to over communicate clarity. Once the leadership has determined the direction to go, the organization needs to understand the decision and have a clear handle on exactly what is happening. In the absence of clear communication, much confusion arises, says Lencioni. According to the book Team of Teams this is of massive importance.

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The final principle is to reinforce clarity, operationalizing the answers to the six questions specifically in recruiting and hiring decisions, performance management, rewards and real-time recognition. Knowing what the company is all about makes it much easier for everyone in the company to make decisions, contribute and more in sync with their team members as they all work together toward a common goal. Choosing core values can be a massive help to this end. For more on that and creating a Believership read the book Return On Courage or Flex, The New Playbook for Managing Across Differences.

Organizations will know they have reached a healthy state when they have good employees, low attrition, high engagement, and minimal confusion or political gamesmanship occurring. This is a direct result of a company whose culture, strategy, management and operations fit together seamlessly and make sense as a whole. The book GRIT outlines a great example of how management decisions can poison a work environment by explaining The Enron Ranking System.

With his easy-to-read style, practical advice and interesting anecdotes from his many years as a consultant, Patrick Lencioni provides an approachable picture of a healthy organization and what it takes to achieve such a result, along with practical advice that doesn't shirk from harsh realities.

For example, in order to achieve a fully aligned leadership team and work toward organizational health, some companies may need to make hard decisions about longtime employees who are not contributing to the desired cultural end-state of the company. If you read the book WHOthis is a major issue in many companies, but can also be solved.

Lencioni says any sacrifices or difficult conversations that need to happen, however, are all worthwhile in the end, because a healthy organization is one that will operate more effectively, productively and profitably for years to come. For more on running an effective, productive and profitable company read Traction, E-Myth or Built To Sell.

About The Author Patrick Lencioni

Patrick Lencioni is a founder of his consulting firm, The Table Group, which specializes in executive team development and creating organizational health. He is a key leader of the corporate organizational health movement. He has written 11 books, including New York Times bestsellers. His books have sold nearly 10 million copies and have been translated into over 30 languages globally.

Patrick serves as the President of his consulting firm, which entails speaking, writing and advising executives on leadership, organizational health, teamwork and team dynamics. He has worked with and for many of the Fortune 500.

Prior to his founding of The Table Group in 1997, Patrick Lencioni worked for Bain & Company, the Oracle Corporation and Sybase. Patrick Lencioni lives with his wife and sons in the Bay Area.

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