The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, by Patrick Lencioni

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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Culturize, by Jimmy Casas

“We must take the time to reflect on and be willing to be vigilant in examining our school cultures through the eyes of students and staff and ask, ‘What role are we playing in culturizing our schools?’ . . . What are we doing about it? Until we take action, nothing changes” (pg 4)

“To affect change, we must be honest - with one another and ourselves; we must be willing to reflect on our own leadership” (pg 5).

“One of the hardest places to look when things aren’t going as well as we hoped is at ourselves and our own attitudes, practices, and skill sets, especially if it means examining the influence we have.” We must examine “our own ability to lead effectively” (pg 6).

“Everyone here has the capacity to lead, and everyone here is responsible for the culture and climate of our organization” (pg 6).

“Because of the demands placed on our profession, it can be easy to lose our sense of passion, our sense of purpose, and our sense of pride” (pg 9).

“It is never about us; it is about serving others and server the greater good” (pg 15).

“Every child deserves the opportunity to be a part of something great . . . we serve in a profession where we are blessed every day with the opportunity to help change the course of someone’s life with our words, our actions, and our belief in their abilities” (pg. 16).

“Some students have shared stories of unfulfilled promises by adults and a system which assured them of success only to find out they meant success for those who are willing to play the game of school and who were compliant” (pg 24).

“Getting to know our students on a more personal level, such as their interests, fears, and talents is vital to creating a classroom culture where every child feels valued and understood” (pg 27).

“We can’t expect that our students will always have opinions that coincide with the way we see things in our adult world. But we can expect they will have experiences as students that will shape them., and it is our responsibility as the adults to set the tone for those experiences and make sure we never leave a student asking, “Why won’t he or she just listen to me?” (pg 47).

“If you want to improve student behavior in your school, you must change the way adults in your school interact with student and with each other” (pg 52).

“If students or staff members are constantly asking for permission, you have not done a very good job of building capacity” (pg 63).

“Take time to enjoy what you do! . . . When we focus our energy on giving of ourselves to others, others notice the magnitude of our joy and passion to serve and become inspired to do the same” (pg 65).

Reminds me of this Adam Grant quote:

“One of the best skills we can teach kids is failure recovery” (pg 66).

“In situations where you can anticipate an emotional reaction to a no response, pay closer attention to how you say no so it doesn’t become more about you than the no itself” (pg 70).

“How you feel is not the best guide for what you should do . . . press pause and ask yourself what this situation requires of you” (pg 76).

“Leadership is not just about how we behave when we know what to do; rather, it is best seen in the actions we take when we don’t know what to do” (pg 80).

“People don’t want to hear excuses, especially from a leader who prides himself on owning his mistakes” (pg 81).

“If you want them to be honest, they’ll need to trust that you will respond positively and act to improve the areas they think need attention” (pg 86).

“When they are taking the risk to be honest with you, it is the time to listen, not talk” (pg 87).

“Every person in your organization helps to establish its culture” (pg 91).

“Educators who have remained positive over the years have figured out they are happier when they own their own morale rather than depend on others or place blame somewhere else for their attitude. Those who expect excellence believe they don’t need a title in front of their name to be a leader” (pg 95).

“Your culture of your organization will be defined by the worst behavior you are willing to tolerate” -Todd Whitaker (pg 97).

“You can’t inspire your students and colleagues to be great if you are not aspiring for greatness yourself . . . it means if you’re willing to be courageous and vulnerable in order to make the impact. You set the example. Model the kind of attributes and behaviors you hope to inspire in others” (pg. 109).

“My perspective is that everyone is responsible for carrying the banner for their school community at all times, and that means being willing to acknowledge, either through words or actions (and always in a respectful tone and manner), that certain behaviors are not acceptable in the school environment” (pg 127).

“Give two minutes of your time to one student and one staff member every day” - be present! (pg. 146).

“Never lose sight of the fact that the most important measure of your success will be how you treat other people” - Scott Eddy (pg. 167).

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