Quotes from Patrick Lencioni

Team Rewards By shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement, the team can create a culture of accountability. This occurs because a team is unlikely to stand by quietly and fail because a peer is not pulling his or her weight.

I believe that all successful organizations share two qualities: they are smart, and they are healthy. An organization demonstrates that it is smart by developing intelligent strategies, marketing plans, product features, and financial models that lead to competitive advantage over its rivals. It demonstrates that it is healthy by eliminating politics and confusion, which leads to higher morale, lower turnover, and higher productivity.

First, we go figure out how to recognize a real team player, the kind of person who can easily build trust, engage in healthy conflict, make real commitments, hold people accountable, and focus on the team's results. Then, we stop hiring people who can't. Finally, we help the people who are acting like jackasses change their ways or move on to different companies.

You see, I don't understand why everyone thinks sports is the only way to learn about teamwork. I never played sports much, even as a kid. But I was in a band in high school and college, and I think I figured out the team thing from that.

I have found that most leaders spend the majority of their time and energy making their organizations smarter, with relatively little effort directed toward making them healthier.

The idea is that your clients are looking for good suggestions, and they don't mind sifting through some not-so-good ones as long as they're offered with good intentions and with no ego attached.

The best performance management systems include only essential information, and allow managers and their employees to focus on the work that must be done to ensure success.

healthy organizations have a way of making themselves smarter. Even if their ideas are temporarily inferior to those of competitors, they are usually humble and efficient enough to recognize their deficiencies and make changes in their plans before it is too late.

The point here is that most reasonable people don't have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.

healthy companies are far less susceptible to ordinary problems than unhealthy ones. During difficult times, for instance, employees will remain committed to a healthy organization and stay with it longer, ultimately working to reestablish competitive advantage.

There is relatively little emphasis on legal issues and quantitative evaluations, which often distract employees from the critical messages their managers are trying to communicate. What is more, these systems are customized to provoke meaningful discussion between managers and employees about relevant issues that they are dealing with on a daily basis.

Every good organization specifies what it plans to achieve in a given period, and these goals, more than the financial metrics that they drive, make up the majority of near-term, controllable results. So, while profit may be the ultimate measure of results for a corporation, the goals and objectives that executives set for themselves along the way constitute a more representative example of the results it strives for as a team. Ultimately, these goals drive profit.

Now, the wrong way to determine an organization's values is to survey the employee population. This may seem to be a useful way to test a hypothesis, but it is not a replacement for the introspection and discussion of an executive team. More important, it can lead to the adoption of a value set that executives are not willing to support.

It's the lack of conflict that's a problem. Harmony itself is good, I suppose, if it comes as a result of working through issues constantly and cycling through conflict. But if it comes only as a result of people holding back their opinions and honest concerns, then it's a bad thing. I'd trade that false kind of harmony any day for a team's willingness to argue effectively about an issue and then walk away with no collateral damage.

this point is critical—no one but the head of an organization can make it healthy.

You have tension. But there is almost no constructive conflict. Passive, sarcastic comments are not the kind of conflict I'm talking about.

Take a bullet for the client. Make everything about the client. Honor the client's work. Do the dirty work.

as odd as it may seem, it is actually more important for leaders to focus on making their organizations healthy than on making them smart.

There is something so powerful about a person who in one moment can be confident enough to confront a client about a sensitive personal issue, and then in the next moment humble themselves and take a position of servitude. It's the paradoxical nature of it all that makes it work.

Real results come from putting your momentary needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals.

they need to weigh in before they can really buy in.

organizational health is relatively hard to measure, and even harder to achieve. It feels soft to executives who prefer more quantitative and reliable methods of steering their companies. It also entails a longer lead time to implementation than does a technical or marketing strategy, which yields more immediate results and gratification.

It's about knowing that in certain moments you have to offer yourself up as a minor sacrifice to help them accomplish what they need to accomplish. Letting them abuse you, on the other hand, would be a terrible disservice. I know it seems like a fine line, but it's a real one, and it can be done.

Once we achieve clarity and buy-in, it is then that we have to hold each other accountable for what we sign up to do, for high standards of performance and behavior.