Learn What The 3 Biases Of Leadership Are
25 November 2022
The Three Biases Of Leadership
Insights from 'The Advantage' by Patrick Lencioni
If organizational health is so important, then why don't more leaders pay attention to it?
The short answer is that too many leaders think it's beneath them.
And unfortunately, it's hard to blame them for this view.
It's easy to understand why leaders are skeptical of improving organizational health when the idea of corporate culture has been reduced to surface-level topics in recent years.
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But organizational health is about much more than just culture.
It provides the context for strategy, marketing, finance, and everything else the organization does.
In The Advantage, Lencioni lays out the three biases that leaders must overcome to fully embrace the power of improving their organizational health.
The first is sophistication bias.
Leaders think they're too sophisticated to pursue organizational health.
Part of this is because it seems too simple to them.
They don't see it as a real opportunity for gaining a significant competitive advantage.
But it's important to remember that not all opportunities require superintelligence.
Some just require discipline and common sense.
The second bias is the adrenaline bias.
Leaders think they're too busy to pursue organizational health.
Some even have an adrenaline addiction from constantly putting out their company's day-to-day fires.
It's hard for them to slow down and deal with the non-urgent issues that are crucial for their organization's long-term success.
And finally, the third bias is the quantification bias.
Leaders think it's a waste of time to improve aspects of their business that aren't easily measurable.
And organizational health involves so many variables that it's impossible to precisely measure its financial impact.
To embrace organizational health, leaders have to realize that it has to have a real impact on their company even if they can't measure it.
When you think about organizational health, do you fall prey to one of these biases?
Lencioni encourages us to be aware of these biases and to keep an open mind.
As a former consultant that liked to measure everything, some of these were tough for me to get over earlier in my career.
Having run several organizations and the benefit of hindsight, I know just how accurate Lencioni's observations are.
When organizational health is taken seriously, it becomes one of the biggest opportunities for the company's overall improvement.
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