Quotes from Patrick Lencioni

When people come together and set aside their individual needs for the good of the whole, they can accomplish what might have looked impossible on paper. They do this by eliminating the politics and confusion that plague most organizations. As a result, they get more done in less time and with less cost.

The ultimate test of a great team is results.

As it turns out, the primary motive for most young people, and too many older ones, is the rewards that leadership brings with it. Things like notoriety, status, and power. But people who are motivated by these things won't embrace the demands of leadership when they see little or no connection between doing their duties and receiving those rewards.

BE COHESIVE. BE CLEAR. OVER-COMMUNICATE. REINFORCE.

They put every candidate through at least five interviews. They insist on using a core set of behavioral questions, asked in slightly different ways by different people. And then they make all the interviewers get together in a room and debrief." Jamie paused. "They do this for vice presidents, consultants, even receptionists.

The questions were, 'What did you accomplish?' 'What will you accomplish next?' 'How can you improve?'" "That's it?" "Not quite. The question on the back was, 'Are you embracing the values?

But no matter what is going on, there has to be something ultimately at stake. A prize, survival, sanity, success, even peace of mind.

And what if she says she's up for it?" Bobby asked. "How do we teach her to be smarter?" "That's a high-class problem, my friend," Clare announced. "If Attila the Hun walked into this office right now and convinced me that he really wanted to get better dealing with people, I know we could do it. Most training and development comes down to how much a person wants to change.

1. What makes your family unique?

humility is the single greatest and most indispensable attribute of being a team player.

2. What is your family's top priority—rallying cry—right now?

3. How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions?

his job is to create the best team possible, not to shepherd the careers of individual

Building a cohesive leadership team is the most critical of the four disciplines because it enables the other three. It is also the most elusive because it requires considerable interpersonal commitment from an executive team and its leader.

identify one particular insight from their profile that they feel highlights a weakness that they would like to address for the good of the team.

The essence of a cohesive leadership team is trust, which is marked by an absence of politics, unnecessary anxiety, and wasted energy. Every executive wants to achieve this, but few are able to do so because they fail to understand the roots of these problems, the most damaging of which is politics.

I'm not saying we need to be spending more time in meetings, necessarily. But we definitely need to be having more than one type of meeting.

KEY POINTS—BUILDING TRUST • Trust is the foundation of teamwork. • On a team, trust is all about vulnerability, which is difficult for most people. • Building trust takes time, but the process can be greatly accelerated. • Like a good marriage, trust on a team is never complete; it must be maintained over time.

This blindness occurs because what executives believe are small disconnects between themselves and their peers actually look like major rifts to people deeper in the organization.

When an executive decides not to confront a peer about a potential disagreement, he or she is dooming employees to waste time, money, and emotional energy dealing with unresolvable issues. This causes the best employees to start looking for jobs in less dysfunctional organizations, and it creates an environment of disillusionment, distrust, and exhaustion for those who stay.

More than anything else, cohesive teams are efficient. They arrive at decisions more quickly and with greater buy-in than non-cohesive teams do.

One of the best ways to recognize a cohesive team is the nature of its meetings. Passionate. Intense. Exhausting. Never boring.

Well, some teams get paralyzed by their need for complete agreement, and their inability to move beyond debate.

I don't know how else to say this, but building a team is hard.