We discussed the importance of your business culture In Creating the Discipline of the Advantage or what Patrick Lencioni describes as Organizational Health:
Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
Discipline 2: Create Clarity
Discipline 3: Over-Communicate Clarity
Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity
Lencioni feels that the classic areas of business—finance, marketing, strategy, are incremental and fleeting. Due to advancing technology it’s harder than ever been to maintain a competitive advantage based on intelligence or knowledge. Information just changes hands too rapidly today. The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health.
Today let’s look at how Pearson’s Law helps you achieve Discipline’s 2-4, although not in totality. Pearson’s Law remember is, “When Performance is measured, performance improves. When Performance is measured and reported back, Performance improves dramatically."
To achieve Organizational Health in Disciplines 2- 4 let’s examine what Lencioni recommends:
Discipline 2: Create Clarity: Healthy organizations minimize the potential for confusion by clarifying…
- Why do we exist?
- How do we behave?
- What do we do?
- How will we succeed?
- What is most important, right now?
- Who must do what?
Discipline 3: Over-Communicate Clarity: Healthy organizations align their employees around organizational clarity by communicating key messages through…
- Repetition: Don’t be afraid to repeat the same message, again and again
- Simplicity: The more complicated the message, the more potential for confusion and inconsistency
- Multiple mediums: People react to information in many ways; use a variety of mediums
- Cascading messages: Leaders communicate key messages to direct reports; the cycle repeats itself until the message is heard by all
Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity: Organizations sustain their health by ensuring consistency in…
- Hiring
- Managing performance
- Rewards and recognition
- Employee dismissal
The colored bullets above apply to following Pearson’s Law. Choosing a simple success criteria that Positioning Systems and Gazelle’s coaches recommend for red, yellow, green to indicate success or failure (meeting or falling short of your priorities and objectives), you establish, over communicate and reinforce clarity.
Establishing Strategic Discipline in your business, the rituals of setting priorities, determining metrics and then meeting rhythms goes a long way to begin building organizational health. Questions on how to accomplish this, ask us for a Needs Assessment of your business.
Plan to provide a quick update on my health and a lesson on Strategic Discipline for next blog!