Patrick Lencioni: Chick-fil-A Leadercast Blast From The Past
Monday’s post highlighted the upcoming Chick-fil-A Leadercast. As the date for this year’s Chick-fil-A Leadercast approaches in a month I am re-posting some highlights from previous years to provide a taste of what you might expect at this year’s event.
Patrick Lencioni
Best-selling author & president of The Table Group
- Your single greatest opportunity for competitive advantage is free, accessible to anyone and is virtually untapped in most organizations.
- CEO SW Airline, Gary Kelly: Asked him why don’t your competitors do this? So many companies believe it is beneath them
3 types of bias in many organizations
- Sophistication bias: most organizations believe that working on organizational health is beneath them.
- Adrenaline bias-need quick fix, I need something that I can do immediately, right now
- Quantification Bias-can’t quantify how organization health impacts bottom line and therefore I can’t make it important to pursue this
Organizational Health: Any organization that succeeds, has to be good at 2 things:
1. Smart: good decision processes, systems, makes good decisions, has good communication, good marketing and sales, etc.,
2. Healthy: minimal politics and confusion, really good people relations, (good people rarely leave healthy organizations)
- Almost impossible to build a competitive advantage based on knowledge because it can be copied so fast these days with the speed of information transfer via internet and other means.
- Your competitive advantage will be the health of your organization.
- Chick-fil-A and SW Airlines are not smarter companies than their competition, no, instead they have built culture where the make better decisions.
- Building culture is a rigourous process.
Four disciplines of a healthy organization
1. Build a cohesive leadership team
- Key is vulnerability
- Great leaders are vulnerable
- Great leaders build great trust on their team, vulnerability based trust.
- If a leader can’t be vulnerable first you will not get vulnerability and trust on the rest of the team.
- Unhealthy teams make bad decisions, have poor strategies, make product mistakes.
- When you are a leader people see you sweating before you even know it.
- I am not sure that you can be too vulnerable.
- The people we lead know what is going one with us and the organization. They see our weaknesses.
- Be vulnerable, learn how to embrace that!
2. Create Clarity: intelligently aligned around 6 questions
- Why do we exist?
- How do we behave?
- What do we do?
- What is the thing that makes us unique?
- What is the most important thing that we do right?
- Who needs to be doing what in order for this to work?
Behavioral Values
- What are your 2-3 key behavioral values
- Great orgs identify these and be brutally intolerant about these two things
- You have a great value when you know you are willing to be punished for it CFA-not open on Sundays SW Airlines-humor
- Make decisions based on your core values
- Sometimes this pushes people away
3. Over communicate the Clarity you Create
- Can never get tired of repeating ourselves , we must repeat ourselves over and over
- We have to be so comfortable over communicating
- If you want to be cool don’t be a leader
4. Put structure in place that reinforces the clarity you created, the values you hold as most important
- The structure will reinforce the behaviors that support these values (the structures are how you hire/fire, behave, treat one another, etc.)
- Great leaders are comfortable making the distinctions that separate them from the people who won’t follow their values. Leaders are willing to draw a line in the stand and accept the consequences for those who cross it.
Apply these same principles in your home!
- Husband/Wife must be vulnerable with one another.
- Have to be vulnerable as parents.
- Define and be clear who you are as a family, define your 2-3 core values.
- Have core values defined, what are the two or three things that make us who we are
- Who are you? You must communicate those over and over, and put structure in place to support core values and the behaviors that represent them.
Be sure to understand that when we change the organizational health of our companies we impact the families of the people who work for us in a positive way.Great leaders are humble people who are willing to be vulnerable to those they lead!
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