I knew from the moment Patrick Lencioni walked on stage and warned the audience about his ADD tendencies (look! A bird!) I was going to like him. My first instinct was dead-on and as he went on to compare parenting to business (which validated MY BOOK), I began to like him more and more 
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Although I’ve read his book, The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, many times, and even used it with my management team many years ago, he still managed to share the material in a fresh and engaging manner.
Since I don’t want to reiterate the whole book here (it’s a good one so go buy it and read it!), I wanted to share the couple of nuggets that I took away that I don’t remember reading in the book:
- Trust on a team is the crucial foundation of a good team and one way that it shows itself is through vulnerability. A group that can be vulnerable with each other has trust.
- Managers and CEOs are often afraid to over-communicate. He compared it to the husband whose wife asks “Honey, do you love me?” and to which he replies “I told you when we got married that I loved you. I promise to let you know if it changes.” He asserted that employees actually need to hear something 7 times before it really sinks in.
- Conflict based on trust is the pursuit of the best answer. Conflict without trust is politics. (LOVE THIS!)
- When you avoid addressing a difficult performance issue because you don’t like conflict or you’re afraid you’ll hurt someone’s feelings, you’re really being selfish.
- Lack on conflict leads to no commitment. If folks don’t weigh in on a decision, they don’t buy in, either. The leader’s job is actually to pull out conflict in order to encourage buy in.
His casual manner, funny stories, and practical advice made for a worthwhile session. He was, in my opinion, one of the top sessions of the day.
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Tags: #wbf09, Business, Patrick Lencioni, world business forum
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Patrick Lensioni is a great man with such divine personality, thanks for sharing materials about him
Julie: I couldn’t agree with you more – Lencioni had to be the best presenter yesterday, not only on account of his great style and excellent story-telling capabilities, but his great material and useful ideas.
My own personal favorites included:
- Great leaders have combination of personal humility and deep awareness of the effect of their own pronouncements
- One way to get people to be more intimate and trusting with each other is simply to have a round of discussions of significant childhood experiences
- Importance of either remedying or eliminating \poisonous\ non-trustworthy team members if you want a functioning team
- Two requirements for business success – being smart and being healthy, as a business. This was directly analogous to the \short-termism\ issue that Bill George addressed.
And, one of his deepest insights, boiled down to a very simple aphorism, that:
- Managing a company is somewhat like managing a family. It isn’t theoretically complex to understand, just emotionally hard to do.