The Advantage summary

When thinking about organizational health, most leaders stumble into one of the three biases: the sophistication bias, the adrenaline bias or the quantification bias.

First, there’s the sophistication bias: Achieving organizational health is seen as too simple a task by many well-educated business executives, as all it demands are high levels of discipline, persistence, courage and a healthy dose of common sense. This can be off-putting if the leader believes that dramatic improvements can only come from sophisticated, complex endeavors.

At the end of the day, all companies are made up of people and the relationships between them. This means that no company can achieve its full potential when the relationships between its leaders and various departments are dysfunctional.

So how can this unfortunate state of affairs be avoided?

Anyone who has been on any kind of team knows that cohesion greatly contributes to that team’s efficacy. And for a leadership team to be cohesive, it must embrace five behavioral principles:

First, great leadership teams must have trust – more specifically vulnerability-based trust, the kind of trust that stems from openly sharing one’s vulnerabilities and mistakes. This allows team members to say things like, “I need help,”“Your idea is better than mine,” “I screwed up,” and even, “I’m sorry.” Such honesty requires a strong bond among team members, but saves a lot of time and energy for all parties.

Like phalanges in ancient Greece, a team achieves maximum efficacy when members are maximally aligned with each other in thought and action.

To eliminate even small discrepancies in their thinking, a leadership team must answer six critical questions.

Once the leadership has established clarity and alignment over the six critical questions presented in the previous blink, they must communicate their answers to the rest of the company. In fact, they must overcommunicate them.

Great leaders should consider themselves Chief Reminding Officers – yes, they must plot a strategic course for the company, but one of their top priorities must also be to remind people of it on a regular basis.

No company can survive without its employees. Therefore, a key part of any company is its human systems – meaning the processes that involve managing people, from hiring and performance management to training and compensation.

To effectively design and lead human systems, leaders must ensure the systems reflect the special nature of the culture of their organization. In turn, they can only determine this special nature by answering the six critical questions.

It is a great irony that many leaders consider the meetings of the leadership team to be a waste of time. In fact they are the single best indicator of organizational health.

Leadership team meetings are where cohesion, clarity and communication originate, or, alternatively, where the seeds of an unhealthy organization are sown.

Now that we have seen that not all issues should be discussed in one meeting, let’s look at four different kinds of meetings, each differing in its objectives and the frequency with which it is held.

First, there are the daily Check-In meetings, where teams make a habit of gathering once a day for ten minutes to exchange information. This saves a lot of time because many issues can really be resolved in less than a minute if all the necessary stakeholders are in the room, whereas chasing after the necessary inputs one-by-one would take hours.

At the end of the day, the main factor helping an organization become healthier is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the leader.

Far too often, however, leaders think that tasks related to organizational health should be handled by others. This is a mistake, as the leader must lead through example.

The key message in these blinks:

For a company to succeed, it is not enough for it to have smart leaders. It must also be healthy, and the responsibility for this lies with its leadership team. By defining and communicating the organization’s values and priorities clearly, they can attain the competitive advantage that a healthy organization has over squabbling unhealthy ones.