Four Disciplines For Leading with Clarity

By Will Mancini

An organization doesn’t become healthy in a linear, tidy fashion.
– Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage
Patrick Lencioni’s latest book The Advantage is a comprehensive, practical guide, covering many of the topics introduced in one of his eight business fable books. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is just a repackaging – The Advantage goes far beyond that. In it you will find some very practical, hands-on tools to help your organization become healthy [clear].
The central theme of the book is today’s topic: The Four Disciplines Model. Here you can see why I have made the connection between health and clarity in my previous blog posts. Check out the Four Disciplines- this stuff is CLARITY dynamite.
NOTE: Just in case you are new to the blog, theses four disciplines speak directly to the focus of my calling with ministries. We operate under the banner of Auxano which means “to cause to grow.”  Hardie Morgan is going through our Vision Pathway right now at Grace Presbyterian in Houston. He wrote me an e-mail that said, “I think you and Patrick Lencioni must have been related in a prior life.”
Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
An organization simply cannot be healthy if the people who are chartered with running it are not behaviorally cohesive in five fundamental ways. In any kind of organization, from a corporation to a department within that corporation, from a small, entrepreneurial company to a church or a school, dysfunction and lack of cohesion at the top inevitably lead to a lack of health throughout.
Discipline 2: Create Clarity
In addition to being behaviorally cohesive, the leadership team of a healthy organization must be intellectually aligned and committed to the same answers to six simple but critical questions. There can be no daylight between leaders around these fundamental issues.  (In Church Unique, the clarity model is built on five, not six, questions.
Discipline 3: Overcommunicate Clarity
Once a leadership team has established behavioral cohesion and created clarity around the answers to those questions, it must then communicate those answers to employees clearly, repeatedly, enthusiastically, and repeatedly (that’s no typo). When it comes to reinforcing clarity, there is no such thing as too much communication.
Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity
Finally, in order for an organization to remain healthy over time, its leaders must establish a few critical, non-bureaucratic systems to reinforce clarity in every process that involves people. Every policy, every program, every activity should be designed to remind your team what is really most important.
I hope today’s post and the previous two have enticed you to get The Advantage. The book certainly stands alone, but there is also a great deal of web content available on organizational health.
What are you waiting on?
The health of your ministry [clarity] is at stake!