Issue No. 481 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting recommends a serious (but also hilarious) book—the latest poke-in-the-ribs from Patrick Lencioni. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for the new book from John Pearson and Jason Pearson, Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned. See Mistake #7 below.
Order Chick-fil-A milkshakes and host a “Milkshakes and Motives” team meeting. Will you enjoy peach, cookies-and-cream, or chocolate?
Why Do You Want to Be a Leader?
Best-selling business author Patrick Lencioni’s latest book will shock you. (Don’t skip a page.) He calls for “the end of servant leadership.” And this priority: “If someone were to dive into a stack of my books for the first time, I’d tell them to start with this one.”
The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities is classic Lencioni. The “leadership fable” business story, plus end-of-the-book lessons, has a new twist—and it’s not subtle. The poke-in-the-rib: Why do you want to be a leader?
Lencioni: “…the majority of the other books I’ve written focus on how to be a leader: How to run a healthy organization, lead a cohesive team, manage a group of employees.” (All good, right?)
But he admits, “However, over the years I’ve come to the realization that some people won’t embrace the instructions I provide because of why they wanted to become a leader in the first place.”
And by the way, don’t invite Lencioni to your commencement program! When Lencioni hears a graduation speaker admonish students to “go out into the world and be a leader,” he says he wants to stand up and shout, “No!!! Please don’t be a leader, unless you’re doing it for the right reason, and you probably aren’t!”
I’ve read and reviewed my fair share of Lencioni leadership fables—and highly recommended them to others. So would I agree with him that new readers and both emerging and experienced leaders should read The Motive first? I get the importance of “why,” but don’t wanna-be-leaders need a good dose of “how” before they can fully understand the unhealthy “why” motivations they bring to the table?
My suggestion: ask your team members to read The Motive and then huddle over this question. Maybe call the event “Milkshakes and Motives.”
No spoiler alert here—because I don’t want to reveal the business story (two CEOs: one healthy, one not so healthy). The story is just 125 pages, including blank pages. The lesson section is just 40 powerful pages.(You can read this over a long lunch at Chick-fil-A—or listen to it in just 2 hours and 37 minutes.)
In the leadership fable, you’ll see two competing motivations for being a leader. If you’re a CEO, does your motivation for being CEO align with how your team views your motivation? Interestingly, writes Lencioni, “As passionately as I feel about all this I almost didn’t write this book because one of my heroes didn’t agree with its premise.”
The hero? Alan Mulally, former CEO at Boeing and Ford, disagreed with a key premise in Lencioni’s book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. You’ll love the scuffle between Mulally and Lencioni on pages 129-131 of The Motive. Gratefully, Lencioni did write his twelfth book and (okay, I’ll say it), it’s a must-read.
SURGERY AS DRUDGERY? Back in 2012, I picked The Advantage (a helpful summary of his earlier books) as my book-of-the-year. I recently quoted this gut-check wisdom to a leader:
Lencioni says that “bad meetings are the birthplace of unhealthy organizations and good meetings are the origin of cohesion, clarity and communication.” He adds, “If someone were to offer me one single piece of evidence to evaluate the health of an organization, I would not ask to see its financial statements, review its product line, or even talk to its employees or customers: I would want to observe the leadership team during a meeting.”
When discussing “the five omissions” of unhealthy leaders, The Motive enriches Lencioni’s very high view of the importance of well-led meetings—with these memorable metaphors:
“A leader seeing his or her meetings as drudgery would be like a doctor viewing surgery that way. Or a teacher thinking about class lectures that way. Or a quarterback seeing games that way. As I said earlier, meetings are the setting, the arena, the moment when the most important discussions and decisions take place. What could be more important?
“Think about it this way. The best place to observe whether a surgeon is good at her job, a teacher is good at his, or a quarterback is good at his, is to watch them during an operation, a class session, or a game, respectively. What is the best place to observe a leader? That’s right—a meeting.”
Read the book to learn the other four “omissions”—and then discuss all five topics at your “Milkshakes and Motives” team meeting. (I’ll have the Chick-fil-A peach milkshake please.) The business fable is hilarious at points (with a dose of locker room language) and it’s impossible to read it and not discuss it. Enjoy.
To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities, by Patrick M. Lencioni. Are you a listener? Listen to the book on Libro.fm (2 hours, 37 minutes). And thanks to Jeff Gerhardt for recently gifting the book to me.
P.S. In addition to The Motive and The Advantage, check out these other books from Patrick Lencioni (after you’re read The Motive!):
• Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business (read my review)
• The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues (read my review)
• The Five Temptations of a CEO (read my review)
• The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and Their Employees) - (read my review)
Note: listen to the books at Libro.fm
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS
1) Patrick Lencioni lists two unhealthy results when “leaders accept the less-than-amazing status of meetings.” Have we ever had an “amazing” team meeting? What’s your guess on the two unhealthy results that occur with “less-than-amazing” meetings?
2) Lencioni defines management: “…the act of aligning people’s actions, behaviors and attitudes with the needs of the organization and making sure that little problems don’t become big ones.” He adds, “Avoiding this is nothing but negligence.” Do you agree with his definition? Do leaders really need to “manage”?
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Mistake #7 of 25:
Minimizing Murphy’s Law
Insights from Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned, by John Pearson with Jason Pearson
You’d think the new leader of the Christian MANAGEMENT Association (now CLA) could have orchestrated a drama-free move from Illinois to California on time and under budget. Oops!
“I was not yet a believer that “If anything can go wrong, it will.” That’s the subtitle of Mistake #7 in the new book by John Pearson with Jason Pearson. Read the story and cringe at John’s cross-country move in 1994! And speaking of cringing…“I cringe when I recall some of the horrendous mistakes I have made during my lifetime,” writes Ted Engstrom. His suggestion: be transparent, keep going, and call your mistakes learning experiences (his italics).
John learned this from Ted: “Experience teaches us to leave room for the unexpected or to isolate ourselves in order to minimize interruptions.” Click here to read John’s review of The Essential Engstrom: Proven Principles of Leadership, by Ted W. Engstrom (Timothy J. Beals, Editor).
Click here to view the list of all 25 mistakes and read the introduction to Mastering Mistake Making. To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Mastering Mistake-Making: My 25 Memorable Mistakes—And What I Learned (10 Minutes for Lifelong Learning Workbook), by John Pearson with Jason Pearson.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Patrick Lencioni preaches that CEOs must also be CROs: Chief Reminder Officers—constantly repeating, repeating, repeating the big ideas (strategy, etc.). If no one is listening to your “corporate speak” anymore—and you need some fresh communication tools— contact Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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