Your business is sitting on a gold mine.
What is the most unexploited business growth opportunity right now?
- An untapped target audience for your products?
- An innovative marketing strategy?
- A powerful sales team?
- A new strategic partnership?
- A re-focused business plan?
Any of those could be a vital need for your company to grow. None of them are as crucial as the area you might be ignoring.
“Organizational Health will one day surpass all other disciplines in business as the greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage.”
The above statement is the thesis of one of the most important business books we’ve read in a while: The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni. He is the author of several best-selling business fables, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Death by Meeting. Lencioni takes a different route in The Advantage. He forgoes storytelling and instead draws upon his 20 years of writing, field research, and executive consulting to some of the world’s leading organizations.
He believes that too many leaders are still limiting their search for advantage to conventional and largely exhausted areas like marketing, strategy, and technology. Lencioni demonstrates there is an untapped gold mine sitting right beneath your business.
The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet, it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it. Dennis and I have sat with dozens of business leaders, many of who run multimillion-dollar companies, and most of them have not considered the impact of being healthy.
Instead of trying to become smarter, leaders and organizations need to shift their focus to becoming healthier, allowing them to tap into the more-than-sufficient intelligence and expertise they already have.
Being a leader and a company that is both smart and healthy is what drives our passion and vision for your business.
It’s not at all touchy-feely, and it’s far more extensive and more important than mere culture.
Smart organizations are good at the fundamentals of business – strategy, marketing, finance, and technology – decision sciences. Being smart is only half the equation. Yet, it occupies almost all the time, energy, and attention of most executives.
The way we describe healthy leaders and healthy businesses is the word Thriving. A healthy leader is a thriving leader who knows how to build a thriving company.
Thriving is comprehensive. It, of course, includes positive financials, market growth, and product innovation. But those things are shallow rewards if they cost the vitality of your people, or they squander your future legacy.
Thriving is about the heart – your heart and the heart of your business. We believe that you and your business will either flounder or flourish based on how well you know your own heart.
- who you are
- what drives you
- why you make the decisions you do
- why you respond to people & situations the way you do
There is just no escaping that the single most significant factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier — or not — is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the person in charge.
Here’s the nut of being a healthy leader:
Resources for this topic:
- Anyone Can Learn to Be a Better Leader, Harvard Business Review
- The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni
- Death by Meeting, by Patrick Lencioni
Three things to think about:
- Where does the smart/healthy scale tip for you?
- How could you take advantage of organizational health to grow your business?
- Open a dialogue with a close colleague or team member about the healthy side of your leadership.
