Our personal health is top of mind these days. For organizational leaders, organizational health is also critical. Major retailers have declared bankruptcy, mergers are up in the air, and even with the recent uptick, US unemployment is about 11% (versus 3.6 in January). 

There are multiple ways of thinking about organizational health. My favorite take comes from Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage. He contrasts health with smarts, and notes that successful organizations need both, but health is really the differentiator. Smarts are relatively well understood; you focus on organizational smarts in business school. Organizational health is also well understood but often overlooked or seen as too soft for serious managers to take on.

Organizational Health

As you see in the model, there are four disciplines to practice on the road to organizational health:

• Discipline 1: Build A Cohesive Leadership Team

• Discipline 2: Create Clarity

• Discipline 3: Overcommunicate Clarity

• Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity

I use The Advantage in many of my classes. Most recently I used the book in my leadership course within Simon Fraser University’s “Invention to Innovation” program. The students are scientists and engineers and, for many, this course was their first introduction to evidence-based management. 

While the evidence was key, perhaps more important was a framework that made sense for building out their organizations. These entrepreneurs could see that the leadership team (and really, any team) needs to be committed to the organization’s goals, not their particular specialty areas’ goals. Lencioni calls this Team Number One. Having that team, or the team where they hold influence, then create clarity around their goals comes next. That said, goals aren’t worth much without clear communication to the rest of the organization -- and if not communicated in sync rather than colored by the communicator’s version. Finally, you need to build the organization’s systems to reinforce the goals.

Now you likely see why I’m such a fan of Lencioni’s approach. His leadership model is aligned with Thinking in 5T™ (focusing on your Target, building using the dimensions of Talent, Technology, and Technique to achieve the Target, while in tune with your Times) at an organization’s highest level. 

Organizational Health Online Course

I’m happy to share that Patrick Lencioni, The Table Group, The Silicon Valley Executive Center, and I have partnered to build a physically-distanced (online) course focused on the first discipline of organizational health: Building a Cohesive Leadership Team. (We’ll cover the other disciplines in future courses.) While I love the book, The Advantage, in the course we work to facilitate your own journey to organizational health -- at whatever level you hold in your organization. I appreciate that they offer discounts for more than 10 enrollments from an organization. Doing the course with others from your organization is a great strategy.

Right for the Times

Willis Towers Watson and other consultants are doing their best to help organizations transit the COVID-19 crisis. They mention that training focused on well-being, reimagining the organization, and reskilling/upskilling all have even greater value than before. Now may be precisely the right time to focus on organizational health, even as we continue to care for our own and our colleagues’ personal health. 

I love hearing this at the end of Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics podcasts and so I’ll use it as my closing as well, “take care of yourself — and, if you can, someone else too.”