The Four Obsessions of An Extraordinary Executive

1. The Four Obsessions of An Extraordinary Executive By Patrick Lencioni

2. Successful organizations • Are smart • Make good decisions • Current knowledge • Decisive • Marketing-Sales-Operations-Finance-Personnel • Well educated-MBAs • Are healthy

3. Healthy Means • Zero politics • No confusion • High morale • Low turnover • High efficiency • High effectiveness • High productivity

4. Healthy Organizations • Can get smarter. • Smart organizations do not get healthy. • No one but the head of an organization can make it healthy. • The leader cannot assign the organization’s cultural well-being to anyone but themselves.

5. Organizational Health • Hard to measure and even harder to achieve. • Feels soft. • Hard-nosed leaders are oblivious or dismissive. • Involves facing the realities of human behavior. • Requires discipline and courage. m • It is why MBAs do not make great managers.

6. What you do as a leaderspeaks so loudly,people can not hear what you say!

7. Discipline One:Build a Cohesive Team • Builds trust, eliminates politics and increases efficiency by: • Knowing one another’s unique strength and weaknesses. • Openly engaging in constructive, ideological conflict. • Holding one another accountable for behaviors and actions. • Committing to group decisions.

8. Assessing CohesivenessRex extracted 20 indicators of a cohesive team. These are being put into an online assessment for REX Members. 1. Know one another’s unique strength and weaknesss. 2. Openly engage in constructive conflict. 3. Holding one another accountable for behaviors and actions. 4. Committing to group decisions 100%. 5. Rare for an issue to be left unresolved. 6. Absence of rumors and gossip. 7. The real meeting is not in the parking lot or private office. 8. Issues are resolved in an environments of trust 9. Meetings are passionate, intense, exhausting, never boring and produce results with high degrees of agreement. 10. Meetings are forums for asking the difficult questions and challenging one another’s ideas 11. No one reads email or does ancillary busy work during the meetings. 12. We fight about their issues, not personalities. 13. No one walks away from a meeting harboring an unspoken resentment. 14. Essentially, everyone in the meeting is naked, i.e. no pretention, no positioning but honest, straightforward complete communication. 15. Meetings are compelling. 16. The important issues are discussed during the meetings. 17. Team members engage in unguarded debate. 18. Members honestly confront one another. 19. Members apologize if they get out of line. 20. Members respect one another.

9. Discipline Two Organizational Clarity • Which behavioral values are fundamental? • What specific business are we in? • Who do we serve? • What needs and wants do we fill? • Who are our competitors? • How are we unique? • What do we plan to achieve? • Who is responsible for what?

10. Discipline ThreeOver communicate organizational clarity • With stories about our commitments • By saying our commitments • By using these commitments to make every decision • By living up to these commitments even when no one is looking • By living up to these commitments even if it is hard.

11. Discipline FourReinforcing organizational clarity through human systems, for example: • Hiring, managing performance, rewards and recognition and employee dismissal. • Is there a consistent process for managing the performance of employees across the organization? • Do you spend time evaluating employee’s behavior versus the organization’s values and goals? • Do managers and employees willingly participate in this system?

12. Is there a consistent process for determining rewards and recognition for employees? • Is there a consistent process for evaluating promotion candidates against organizational values? • Are there consistent criteria for removing employees from the organization? • Are your employees ever terminated because they’re a poor fit to the organization’s values?