chic-fil-a leadercast patrick lencioni

This is the last of my notes from the Chic-fil-A Leadercast. Hope they were helpful! In the final session Patrick Lencioni, founder and president of The Table Group and author of 9 best selling books, killed it! Enjoy the notes.

The single greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage is free, accessible, and untapped

Why we resist simple change:

1. Sophistication bias: the solution is not complex or sophisticated enough
2. Adrenalin bias: we need it to be a quick fix now
3. Quantification bias: because I can’t quantify how important organizational health is, I won’t do it

Organizational Health =

1. Minimal politics and confusion
2. High degree of moral
3. Good people rarely leave healthy organizations

It is impossible in this day and age to build a competitive advantage based on knowledge. But you can build a competitive advantage by building a healthy organization. Every team has a enough experience, talent, and industry knowledge…what they don’t have is a healthy organization.

Building a healthy organization

#1 Build a Cohesive Leadership Team:

Great leaders are vulnerable and this is how you establish trust, predictive trust is different than vulnerability based trust / if a leader on the team can’t be vulnerable first he won’t have a culture of vulnerability and trust on his team / when you’re a leader people see you sweat first

#2 Create Clarity:

6 questions to align around: (bummer I didn’t get them all) why do we exist, how do we behave, what’s the most important thing for us to do right now, who around this table needs to do what next / great organizations define what the 2 or 3 things are that drive them and then they’re relentless about them.

#3 Over-Communicate Clarity:

People have to hear it 7 times before they remember it, great leaders never get tired of repeating themselves, if you’re people can’t do a good impression of you when you’re not around then you’re not saying it enough, if you want to be cool then don’t be a leader

#4 Reinforce Clarity:

Put structure and process in place to support this, how you hire, fire, reward people, institutionalize your culture without bureaucratizing it. How do you hire/filter to fit your culture?