Patrick Lencioni Quotes

there is no such thing as too much communication.

Hungry Only: The Bulldozer

Humility isn't thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.

Trust is just one of five behaviors that cohesive teams must establish to build a healthy organization.

I believe in the old saying that if you can't measure something, you can't improve it.

when leaders fail to tell employees that they're doing a great job, they might as well be taking money out of their pockets and throwing it into a fire,

The hard truth is, bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions, which is the best recipe for mediocrity.

To achieve results. This is the only true measure of a team P.42

At the heart of vulnerability lies the willingness of people to abandon their pride and their fear, to sacrifice their egos for the collective good of the team. While this can be a little threatening and uncomfortable at first, ultimately it becomes liberating for people who are tired of spending time and energy overthinking their actions and managing interpersonal politics at work.

An organization's strategy is simply its plan for success. It's nothing more than the collection of intentional decisions a company makes to give itself the best chance to thrive and differentiate from competitors.

During the Weekly Tactical, there are two overriding goals: resolution of issues and reinforcement of clarity. Obstacles need to be identified and removed, and everyone needs to be on the same page.

organizations learn by making decisions, even bad ones.

Members of trusting teams accept questions and input about their areas or responsibility, appreciate and tap into one another's skills and experiences, and look forward to meetings and other opportunities to work as a group.

Human beings need to be needed, and they need to be reminded of this pretty much every day. They need to know that they are helping others, not merely serving themselves.

The team you belong to must come ahead of the team you lead: this is putting team results (e.g., organizational needs) ahead of individual agendas (e.g., the team or division you lead, your ego, your need for recognition, your career development, etc.) Confidentiality is respected downward more than it is respected upward. Organizational alignment is a direct result of this hierarchy (if it were the other way around, organizational alignment would be very difficult to achieve).

As a leader, you're probably not doing a good job unless your employees can do a good impression of you when you're not around.

When you know your reason for existence, it should effect the decisions you make.

Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.

Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That's why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.

consensus is usually not achievable. The likelihood of six intelligent people coming to a sincere and complete agreement on a complex and important topic is very low.

It's not that they go out of their way to tick off their clients. It's just that they're so focused on saying and doing whatever is in the best interests of those clients that they stop worrying about the repercussions. They make themselves completely vulnerable, or naked, and don't try to protect themselves.

But perhaps most important of all, having too many people on a team makes team dynamics during meetings and other decision-making events almost impossible. That's because a good team has to engage in two types of communication in order to optimize decision making, but only one of these is practical in a large group. According to Harvard's Chris Argyris, those two types of communication are advocacy and inquiry. Basically, advocacy is the statement of ideas and opinions; inquiry is the asking of questions for clarity and understanding. When a group gets too large, people realize they are not going to get the floor back any time soon, so they resort almost exclusively to advocacy. It becomes like Congress (which is not designed to be a team) or the United Nations (ditto).

To tear down silos, leaders must go beyond behaviors and address the contextual issues at the heart of departmental separation and politics. The purpose of this book is to present a simple, powerful tool for addressing those issues and reducing the pain that silos cause. And that pain should not be underestimated. Silos - and the turf wars they enable - devastate organizations. They waste resources, kill productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of goals. But beyond all that, they exact a considerable human toll too. They cause frustration, stress, and disillusionment by forcing employees to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with people who should be their teammates. There is perhaps no greater cause of professional anxiety and exasperation - not to mention turnover - than employees having to fight with people in their own organization. Understandably and inevitably, this bleeds over into their personal lives, affecting family and friends in profound ways.

Conflict is about issues and ideas, while accountability is about performance and behavior.

I knew that these people were not idiots, so the only thing I could attribute their insane response to was a profound lack of courage and intellectual integrity.

Building a cohesive leadership team is the first critical step that an organization must take if it is to have the best chance at success.

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." When everyone on a team knows that everyone else is vulnerable enough to say and mean those things, and that no one is going to hide his or her weaknesses or mistakes, they develop a deep and uncommon sense of trust. They speak more freely and fearlessly with one another and don't waste time and energy putting on airs or pretending to be someone they're not. Over time, this creates a bond that exceeds what many people ever experience in their lives and,

The enemy of accountability is ambiguity

Ripping the Band-Aid off quickly" is

No one on a cohesive team can say, Well, I did my job. Our failure isn't my fault.

No quality or characteristic is more important than trust

Putting together an agenda before a staff meeting is like a marriage counselor deciding what issues she's going to cover with a couple prior to meeting with them.

Remember teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.

Organizational health is the single greatest competitive advantage in any business.

The five behavioral manifestations of teamwork: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results

Naked service providers don't enjoy being wrong; they just realize that it is an inevitability. And

We've learned over the years that having a bad client is worse than having none.

The only real payoff for leadership is eternal.

Like a good marriage, trust on a team is never complete; it must be maintained over time.

Keep in mind that a real team should be spending considerable time together in meetings and working sessions. In fact, it is not uncommon that as much as 20 percent of each team member's time is spent working through issues and solving problems with the team as a whole. p. 105

Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.

leaders confuse the mere transfer of information to an audience with the audience's ability to understand, internalize, and embrace the message that is being communicated.

A functional team must make the collective results of the group more important to each individual than individual members' goals.

To make our meetings more effective, we need to have multiple types of meetings, and clearly distinguish between the various purposes, formats, and timing of those meetings.

An organization has to institutionalize its culture without bureaucratizing it.

Success comes only for those groups that overcome the all-too-human behavioral tendencies that corrupt teams and breed dysfunctional politics within them.

trust is not the same as assuming everyone is on the same page as you, and that they don't need to be pushed.

A leader's first priority is to create an environment where others can do these things and that cannot happen if they are not having effective meetings.

How many of you would rather go to a meeting than a movie?" No hands went up. "Why not?" After a pause, Jeff realized that her question was not a rhetorical one. "Because movies are more interesting. Even the bad ones." His peers chuckled. Kathryn smiled. "Right. But if you really think about it, meetings should be at least as interesting as movies.

We are a passionate family that believes in standing up strongly for what is right, even when there is a cost. We live our lives around our Church and our faith, placing special emphasis on maximizing our involvement in our children's lives, and nurturing family-like relationships with our friends.

avoid, as much as possible, telling clients what they would do if they were to be hired; instead, they just start serving them as though they were already a client. And

All of this highlights one of the most challenging obstacles that prevents teams from taking the time to work on how they work together: adrenaline addiction. Many if not most of the executives and managers I know have become so hooked on the rush of urgent demands and out-of-control schedules that the prospect of slowing down to review, think, talk, and develop themselves is too anxiety-inducing to consider. Of course, this is exactly what they need, which is what addiction is all about - doing things that are bad for you even when confronted with evidence that they are, well, bad for you.

Every endeavor of importance in life, whether it is creative, athletic, interpersonal, or academic, brings with it a measure of discomfort,

Personal growth might not be so bad after all, I decided.

every organization must contribute in some way to a better world for some group of people, because if it doesn't, it will, and should, go out of business.

Really great people rarely leave a healthy organization.

Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully - and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.

Because people who aren't good at their jobs don't want to be measured, because then they have to be accountable for something. Great employees love that kind of accountability. They crave it. Poor ones run away from it.

All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This

His biggest problem was his need for a problem.

even though clients require us to be competent enough to meet their needs, it is ultimately our honesty, humility, and selflessness that will endear us to them and allow them to trust and depend on us.

Achieving vulnerability-based trust (where team members have overcome their need for invulnerability) is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It is a challenge for them to turn those instincts off for the good of the team, but that is exactly what is required.

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.

So many people there are so concerned about being socially conscious and environmentally aware, but they don't give a second thought to how they treat the guy washing their car or cutting their grass.

At its core, naked service boils down to the ability of a service provider to be vulnerable - to embrace uncommon levels of humility, selflessness, and transparency for the good of a client.

Damn it. I had to respect Michael Casey. I had really hoped that I could keep loathing him.

Moments of truth are best handled face-to-face P.30

It's all about standing there naked in front of the client. It's about building trust. And in the end, that means the client trusts them and takes care of them.

The impact of organizational health goes far beyond the walls of a company, extending to customers and vendors, even to spouses and children. It sends people to work in the morning with clarity, hope, and anticipation and brings them home at night with a greater sense of accomplishment, contribution, and self-esteem. The impact of this is as important as it is impossible to measure.

the naked approach is certainly not limited to our field. It applies to anyone who provides ongoing, relationship-based advice, counsel, or expertise to a customer, inside or outside of a company. Or better yet, it applies to anyone whose success is tied to building loyal and sticky relationships with the people they serve.

Almost all of the time and energy in Half Moon Bay was being directed toward consulting to paying clients. Those clients in turn became the sales engine for the firm, and even when we did an occasional cold call, it was the references from clients that shortened the sales cycle considerably. I'm not even sure I'd call it a sales cycle at all.

ADMIT YOUR WEAKNESSES AND LIMITATIONS

Stop making the perfect enemy of the good.

Commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in

If the CEO's behavior is 95 per cent healthy while the rest of the organization is only 50 per cent sound, it is more effective to focus on that crucial and leveraged 5 per cent that makes up the reminder of the CEO's behavior.

Members of teams that tend to avoid conflict must occasionally assume the role of a "miner of conflict" - someone who extracts buried disagreements within the team and sheds the light of day on them. They must have the courage and confidence to call out sensitive issues and force team members to work through them. This requires a degree of objectivity during meetings and a commitment to staying with the conflict until it is resolved. Some

if we weren't willing to tell a client the kind truth, why should they pay us?

Ironically, for peer-to-peer accountability to become a part of a team's culture, it has to be modeled by the leader. That's right. Even though I said earlier that the best kind of accountability is peer-to-peer, the key to making it stick is the willingness of the team leader to do something I call "enter the danger" whenever someone needs to be called on their behavior or performance. That means being willing to step right into the middle of a difficult issue and remind individual team members of their responsibility, both in terms of behavior and results. But most leaders I know have a far easier time holding people accountable for their results than they do for behavioral issues. This is a problem because behavioral problems almost always precede results. That means team members have to be willing to call each other on behavioral issues, as uncomfortable as that might be, and if they see their leader balk at doing this, then they aren't going to do it themselves.

It's as simple as this. When people don't unload their opinions and feel like they've been listened to, they won't really get on board.

the fear of conflict is almost always a sign of problems.

And so a leader of a meeting must make it a priority to seek out and uncover any important issues about which team members do not agree. And when team members don't want to engage in those discussions, the leader must force them to do so. Even when it makes him or her temporarily unpopular.

Take a bullet for the client. Make everything about the client. Honor the client's work. Do the dirty work.

During the next two weeks I am going to be pretty intolerant of behavior that demonstrates an absence of trust, or a focus on individual ego. I will be encouraging conflict, driving for clear commitments, and expecting all of you to hold each other accountable. I will be calling out bad behavior when I see it, and I'd like to see you doing the same. We don't have time to waste.

If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.

Building a strong team is both possible and remarkably simple. But is painfully difficult.

As difficult as it is to build a team, it is not complicated. In fact, keeping it simple is critical, whether you run the executive staff at a multi-national company, a small department within a larger organization, or even if you are merely a member of a team that needs improvement.

If we don't trust one another, then we aren't going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict.

It's about knowing that in certain moments you have to offer yourself up as a minor sacrifice to help them accomplish what they need to accomplish. Letting them abuse you, on the other hand, would be a terrible disservice. I know it seems like a fine line, but it's a real one, and it can be done.

The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, experience and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.

A core value is something you're willing to get punished for.

When a group of intelligent people come together to talk about issues that matter, it is both natural and productive for disagreement to occur. Resolving those issues is what makes a meeting productive, engaging, even fun.

I don't think anyone ever gets completely used to conflict. If it's not a little uncomfortable, then it's not real. The key is to keep doing it anyway

The lack of conflict is precisely the cause of one of the biggest problems that meetings have: they are boring

Members of trusting teams admit weaknesses and mistakes, take risks in offering feedback and assistance, and focus time and energy on important issues, not politics.

A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization.

Trust is the foundation of real teamwork (there is nothing touchy-feely about this).

Clients don't expect perfection from the service providers they hire, but they do expect honesty and transparency. There

Most organizations exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them.

Most of the CEO's who fail think they will find the solution to their problems in Finance, Marketing, Strategic Planning, etc., but they don't look for the solution to their problems inside themselves.

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.