The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business (J-B Lencioni Series)

Once everyone has taken their thirty seconds to list off, not expound on, their top priorities—most will use only ten or fifteen seconds—the leader moves on to the second part of creating a real-time agenda. This entails reviewing the one-page scorecard or chart that the team created—the one that includes their thematic goal, their defining objecti

After that initial off-site, the team will need to put together a playbook, a short summary of those answers and a few other items related to how the team behaves and how it will go about working together going forward. And once the information in the playbook has been finalized and the answers fully agreed on by the team, the next step will be to

Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team — The leadership team is small enough (three to ten people) to be effective. — Members of the team trust one another and can be genuinely vulnerable with each other. — Team members regularly engage in productive, unfiltered conflict around important issues. — The team leaves meetings with clear-cut, ac

Of course, their work is not over. It never is. Like a marriage, it requires ongoing attention and effort: maintaining a cohesive team, revisiting the answers to the six questions, overcommunicating and reinforcing them. But leaders in healthy organizations rarely lament having to invest time and energy in that effort. In fact, they almost always c

Tactical Meeting Scorecard Essentially this part of the meeting is about stepping back and asking, How are we doing against the things we said are most important? And the way teams evaluate themselves is by using an easy and digestible means of assessing progress: colors.

I don’t know of a better system than green for “things are good, we’re ahead of schedule,” yellow for “we’re doing okay, but we’re not yet where we ought to be,” and red for “we’re way behind on this one.” (Okay, we allow teams to use lime green and orange for those in-between evaluations.)

Discipline 2: Create Clarity — Members of the leadership team know, agree on, and are passionate about the reason that the organization exists. — The leadership team has clarified and embraced a small, specific set of behavioral values. — Leaders are clear and aligned around a strategy that helps them define success and differentiate from competito

initial off-site, a couple of days away from the office—productive, intense, non-touchy-feely days—working on the first two disciplines of building team cohesion and creating clarity.

Finally, it’s important to remember that at the end of every meeting, with the exception of the daily check-ins, team members must stop and clarify what they’ve agreed to and what they will go back and communicate to their teams. This is called cascading communication and it is covered in detail in the Discipline 3 section. CHECKLIST FOR MEETINGS M