Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by Patrick Lencioni - Page 2

I work with CEOs and their executive teams... and very few of these people are really indifferent about their employees or their customers.

Great teams argue. Not in a mean-spirited or personal way, but they disagree when important decisions are made.

Hungry people are always looking for more. More things to do. More to learn. More responsibility to take on.

Home is most important in the long run.

I hate touchy-feely things.

If you want to lead, you better love people. Even if you don't like them, you have to love them enough to tell them the truth.

Make sure that the people at the top are working together and there aren't divisions of labor. Don't have people working in silos; have them working across the team.

Where there is humility, there is more success, and lasting success.

The problem is too often they are boring, and boring in a meeting happens for the same reason as in a book or movie - when there is not enough compelling tension. Meetings should be intense.

Team members need to learn to leverage one another, and that doesn't happen over a golf game or on a phone. It happens by getting together and taking the time to know each other.

A lot of times, people find themselves in a meeting where the primary purpose is to receive information, and that's a poor use of people's time. Those meetings can be easily dispensed with and can be an email instead that people read in their own time.

Hungry people almost never have to be pushed by a manager to work harder, because they are self-motivated and diligent. They are constantly thinking about the next step and the next opportunity. And they loathe the idea that they might be perceived as slackers.

I'm kind of a reluctant guru.

Sometimes you're going to have someone on your team who's just not comfortable with being open. You have to ask yourself, 'Is this person going to allow us to be a real team?' Maybe they're not right for your team. You have to be willing to lose someone sometimes.

If you don't know what your family stands for and what your life situation is, you're in trouble.

Members of great teams confront each other when they see something that isn't serving the team.

You can go to work and actually make someone else's job less miserable. Use your job to help others.

I know that any group of people can become a team if they do the right things, but I came to realize over time that if you acquire or develop the right kind of people, that process of building a team is going to be much more effective and easier.

Team members need to be able to admit their weaknesses and mistakes, to acknowledge the strengths of others, and to apologize when they do something wrong.

For organizations seriously committed to making teamwork a cultural reality, I'm convinced that 'the right people' are the ones who have three virtues in common - humility, hunger, and people smarts.

I never accepted the premise that meetings themselves were bad.

Meetings are usually terrible, but they shouldn't be.

Team members have to hold each other accountable. If there's a meeting, all members have to commit to be present and to help one another; they can't just check out when they feel they're not getting any benefits.

People who have a sense of peace that their priorities are in the right place also have a sense of humility and a realistic view on life.

The best leaders over the long term are those who have a sound home life.

We learn by taking action and seeing whether it works or not.

Anybody, and any company, can have a big run of success once, but if you're going to repeat that over time, you need to be aware that you need to keep learning.

At the heart of every great movie is conflict. It's the same with a meeting. There should be conflict and tension.

If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.

It is dangerous if our identity as a leader becomes more important than our identity as a child of God.

There is just no escaping the fact that the single biggest factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier - or not - is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the person in charge.

No action, activity, or process is more central to a healthy organization than the meeting

People will walk through fire for a leader that's true and human.

Open, frank communication is the lynchpin to teamwork. A fractured team is like a fractured bone; fixing it is always painful and sometimes you have to re-break it to heal it fully - and the re-break always hurts more because it is intentional.

Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust.

If you’re not interested in getting better, it’s time for you to stop leading.

Building a strong team is both possible and remarkably simple. But is painfully difficult.

The impact of organizational health goes far beyond the walls of a company, extending to customers and vendors, even to spouses and children. It sends people to work in the morning with clarity, hope, and anticipation and brings them home at night with a greater sense of accomplishment, contribution, and self-esteem. The impact of this is as important as it is impossible to measure.

Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.

Organizational health is the single greatest competitive advantage in any business.

The team you belong to must come ahead of the team you lead: this is putting team results (e.g., organizational needs) ahead of individual agendas (e.g., the team or division you lead, your ego, your need for recognition, your career development, etc.) Confidentiality is respected downward more than it is respected upward. Organizational alignment is a direct result of this hierarchy (if it were the other way around, organizational alignment would be very difficult to achieve).

Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.

Trust is the confidence among team members that their peers' intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates are not comfortable being vulnerable with one another.

If everything is important, then nothing is.

When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer.

Really great people rarely leave a healthy organization.

It's as simple as this. When people don't unload their opinions and feel like they've been listened to, they won't really get on board.

A job is bound to be miserable if it doesn't involve measurement.

Trust is knowing that when a team member does push you, they're doing it because they care about the team.

Members of trusting teams admit weaknesses and mistakes, take risks in offering feedback and assistance, and focus time and energy on important issues, not politics.

Choose your companions before you choose your road.

The vast majority of organizations today have more than enough intelligence, experience and knowledge to be successful. What they lack is organizational health.

Remember teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.

Team members have to be focused on the collective good of the team. Too often, they focus their attention on their department, their budget, their career aspirations, their egos.

Failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness.

Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. And so the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another. And if that sounds touchy-feely, let me explain, because there is nothing soft about it. It is an absolutely critical part of building a team. In fact, it’s probably the most critical.

An organization's strategy is simply its plan for success. It's nothing more than the collection of intentional decisions a company makes to give itself the best chance to thrive and differentiate from competitors.

The key ingredient to building trust is not time. It is courage.

Members of trusting teams accept questions and input about their areas or responsibility, appreciate and tap into one another's skills and experiences, and look forward to meetings and other opportunities to work as a group.

A functional team must make the collective results of the group more important to each individual than individual members' goals.