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Four obsessions of the extraordinary executive

July 18, 2007

What are the qualities of a healthy company? According to Patrick Lencioni, it's healthy, and it's smart.

While business intelligence makes companies smarter, Patrick is the expert on making them healthy. He's a best-selling business author, acclaimed public speaker, and the founder and president of The Table Group, Inc., a management-consulting firm that focuses on organizational health.

Patrick's books include Silos, Politics and Turf Wars, Death by Meeting, The Five Temptations of a CEO, and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Here, he joins Kelsey Howarth, Senior Writer for Cognos, an IBM company to share some thoughts from his best-seller, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.

The four obsessions

KH: What are the 4 obsessions for an extraordinary executive?

PL: "Whether you're a company, a department within a company, or a small entrepreneurial venture, the first obsession must be to make sure your top team is cohesive.

The second obsession is making sure that the team is organizationally clear and on the same page around basic issues.

While it's important to be cohesive behaviorally, executives also have to be intellectually aligned around the company's core purpose, values, strategy, and goals.

The third obsession of a great executive is communicating that clarity until they are blue in the face. People across the organization need to hear it, understand it, and internalize it.

Research shows that you have to communicate something seven times before someone will actually remember and believe it. The third obsession of an extraordinary executive is over-communicating to people throughout the organization.

The fourth obsession of an extraordinary executive is making sure that the basic, non-bureaucratic systems — human systems as we call it — are in place to support these people.

Extraordinary executives sustain organizational health by ensuring consistency in the processes and systems that drive human behavior including hiring, performance management, recognition and reward, and employee dismissal practices."

Balancing smart and healthy

KH: Why are these areas often underemphasized by executives?

PL: "In order to maximize the success of any organization, executives have to do two things: they have to make their organization smart, and they have to make it healthy.

Smart is the realm of decision science, which is where marketing, strategy, technology and business come into play. Critical stuff, but most executives spend about 95 percent of their time on that.

That's how they're trained, it's easier to measure, and it's more comfortable because it's not emotional.

The other side of the equation is the organizational health side – minimizing the politics and confusion, raising the levels of morale and productivity, and ensuring that good people don't leave.

The healthy side is a lot less quantifiable and a lot more behavioral. It's harder to measure, and frankly, most leaders have not been trained very well in that.

So when it comes to looking at these two sides of the equation — the smart and the healthy — we place too much attention on the smart side.

Frankly, most of the organizations I work with are plenty smart enough to succeed. What holds them back is the lack of organizational health. The organizations that practice the four obsessions of an extraordinary executive are the ones that develop sustainable competitive advantage."

Truth-telling and accountability

KH: Can you explain some ways that everyone, not just executives, can use your advice to build a healthier workplace?

PL: "The first thing we all have to recognize is that most leaders want to get better and want us to help them get better. If we can go to them with truth about what they need to know, they'll actually reward us for it.

Leaders are looking for honest feedback so we all need to be truth tellers and have the courage to do that in a kind but honest way.

The other thing that we can do is recognize that as a team player, we have a role in holding our peers accountable and being open to them holding us accountable as well.

If we demonstrate that kind of accountability it's going to spread."

Click to enlarge [PDF]

KH: It sounds like some of the information in your most recent book Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars comes into play here.

Organizations value truth-telling, but also take great pains to make each individual aware of where they fall in the strategy map with the result that once they understand their role they can do it better and be more accountable.

PL: "Exactly. If everyone knows their charter, knows why they exist, and understands how their job fits in the context to what's important, they're going to feel compelled to speak up as opposed to feeling that they're putting themselves at risk."

KH: You place great importance on the role of performance management tools, but mention that companies often lose sight of what performance management is all about. Why is performance management so important and what mistakes should we avoid?

PL: "Performance management is key. It's nothing more than letting people know what they're doing well so they'll keep doing it and letting them know what they need to do differently so they can change it.

One common mistake, especially in larger organizations, is letting performance management become a bureaucratic, almost legalistic tool, as opposed to a system for ensuring that more information and honest feedback are being communicated."

Servant leadership

KH: When you think about leadership what are the key qualities that spring to mind?

PL: "Selflessness is a major one. When I teach my eight-year-old son about leadership I tell him it's about doing what is in the best interest of others more than yourself. That's what a leader is.

I believe in servant leadership and that leaders are there to serve others, not themselves."

KH: Are there some leaders that you admire or you think embody this quality?

PL: "The executives at Southwest Airlines are like that. It's all about the company and doing what's right for their employees and customers and not about themselves.

The CEO Gary Kelly and the President Colleen Barrett are both totally selfless. Another example is Bill Belichick, the best football coach in America. He's not really into the media and everything else. He just does it because he loves it and believes in his players."

Find Out More Read our previous interview with Patrick on Silos, Politics and Turf Wars Book Patrick at your next event Download the Four Obsessions [PDF - 57 KB] Visit the Table Group Web site for more great resources

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