Organizational health “doesn’t require great intelligence or sophistication, just uncommon levels of discipline, courage, persistence, and common sense” (pg 3)
“An organization has integrity - is healthy - when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense” (pg 5).
“Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health” (pg 7).
“What they usually want to avoid at all costs are subjective conversations that can easily become emotional and awkward. And organizational health is certainly fraught with the potential for subjective and awkward conversations” (pg 7).
“The seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are” (pg 9).
“People in healthy organizations, beginning, with the leaders, learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes . . . leaders who pride themselves on expertise and intelligence often struggle to acknowledge their flaws and learn from peers” (pg 9)
“People who work in unhealthy organizations eventually come to see work as drudgery” (pg 13).
“If an organization is led by a team that is not behaviorally unified, there is no chance that it will become healthy” (pg 19).
“A leadership team is a small group of people who are collectively responsible for achieving a common objective for their organization” (pg 21).
“When leaders preach teamwork but exclusively reward individual achievement, they are confusing their people and creating an obstacle to true team behavior” (pg. 26).
“Fundamental Attribution Error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors” (pg 32).
“Seek to understand more than to be understood” (pg 33).
“Even well-intentioned members of a team need to be held accountable if a team is going to stick to its decisions and accomplish its goals” (pg. 54)
When members of a team go to their leader whenever they see a peer deviate from a commitment that was made, they create a perfect environment for distraction and politics” (pg 55).
“Firing someone is not necessarily a sign of accountability, but is often the last act of cowardice for a leader who doesn’t know how or isn’t willing to hold people accountable” (pg 57)
“To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies” (pg 57).
“Conflict is about issues and ideas, while accountability is about performance and behaviors” (pg 60).
“When leaders - and peers - limit their accountability discussions to private conversations, they leave people wondering whether those discussions are happening” (pg 63).
“Some leaders of teams that don’t regularly succeed will insist that they have a great team because team members care about one another and no one ever leaves the team” (pg 65).
“They asserted that successful, enduring organizations understood the fundamental reason they were founded and why they exist” (pg 82).
“When it comes to creating organizational clarity and alignment, intolerance is essential. After all, if an organization is tolerant of everything, it will stand for nothing . . . successful companies adhered strictly to a fundamental set of principals that guided their behaviors and decisions over time, preserving the essence of the organization . . . values are critical because they define a company’s personality. They provide employees with clarity about how to behave, which reduces the need for inefficient and demoralizing micromanagement” (pg 91).
“An organization knows that it has identified its core values correctly when it will allow itself to be punished for living those values and when it accepts the fact that employees will sometimes take those values too far” (pg 94).
“Identify the employees in the organization who already embody what is best about the company and to dissect them, answering what is true about those people that makes them so admired by the leadership team . . . as well as identify employees who, though talented, were or are no longer a good fit for the organization” (pg 102).
“What a crisis provides an organization is a rallying cry, a single area of focus around which there is no confusion or disagreement” (pg 121).
“If we accomplish one thing during the next x months, what would it be?” (pg 122).
“Messaging is not so much an intellectual process as an emotional one” (pg 143).
“The single most important reason to reward people is to provide them with an incentive for doing what is best for the organization” (pg 164).
Grade: A++
A must read for any leader.
Love this obok.
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