Smart vs. Healthy Organizations

Not too long ago I had the chance to re-read The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni.  I love this book.  It is simple yet powerful and provides great advice and solutions for all business leaders and organizations. 

One main point emphasized in the book that’d like to focus on today is the difference between smart and healthy organizations.  As explained in the book, a smart organization has great intelligence and expertise which is demonstrated through excellence in products, marketing, strategy, and in other ways.  They often have sophisticated systems, processes, and policies that help them to be successful and do business.  A healthy organization on the other hand is one that has minimal politics and confusion.  Team members are productive, engaged, and the moral is high because people know what is most important and understand how they contribute to the overall good of the group.  As explained in the book, great organizations are both smart and healthy! 

Unfortunately many organizations focus on only being smart.  So much so that nearly all of their efforts and resources are given to this endeavor—to be a smart organization.  With the advancement of technology, information sharing, and global competition, being smart has become easier and easier to learn, obtain, and duplicate.  Thus its value and competitive advantage has diminished.  Simply being smart isn’t good enough for a company to thrive or even in many cases survive.  A company must also be healthy. 

Healthy organizations are unique.  While it is becoming more and more common that competitors are smart it isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to becoming healthy.  Some reasons are because most can learn to be smart with some effort and time.  Additionally, business leaders are taught and are most familiar and comfortable with using data and viewing the world in hard measurable outcomes which lends itself to becoming smart.  Finally striving to become smart is natural, logical, defined, and expected for all organizations.  This is not always the case with becoming healthy. Unfortunately, the impact of organizational health is hard to quantify and sometimes even feels awkward or inane when talked openly among those in the business world.  Because it is so difficult to measure it becomes unclear how to value it and even how to obtain it so most determine not to focus on it.  Though the complete impact of health may be difficult to measure it doesn’t take away from the obvious competitive advantage an organization with low employee turnover and high morale offers. 

As an example, when we think about personal health it helps us to understand how important and valuable organizational health can be.  Assuming that each of us has been sick before in our life, I believe each of us would agree it is miserable.  When we are sick typically we have lower energy and strength to get things done.  Our ability to concentrate diminishes and our desire and motivation to do anything more than we absolutely have to is sucked right out of us.  We no longer want to or even have the ability to put forth our best effort and give it our all.  On the flip side when we are feeling healthy we are able to do more, think clearer, work harder, and we are so much happier and willing to put forth our best effort.  Those feelings that we have when we are ill are often similar to feelings many people have who work for an unhealthy organization.  Perhaps you’ve experienced this before. Thus organizations that are healthy are able to perform at much higher levels in the long-run than unhealthy ones.  Health is priceless when it comes to our personal lives and it is for organizations too.    

The Advantage points out that being healthy as an organization is much more important than being smart simply because a healthy organization is very likely to become smart whereas a smart one has no greater or lesser chance of becoming healthy.  Therefore much of an organization’s resources and efforts should focus on being healthy.

And that’s it, the “advantage” spoken of in the book is just this, having a healthy organization.  And though striving for health is relatively simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it, it is often over looked.  Being healthy or striving to become healthy should be a lifelong endeavor and will be an invaluable and extremely rewarding pursuit for any organization.  As leaders, we can help every organization we become a part to be healthier by learning and implementing even a few strategies found in The Advantage.  I can think of no greater cause for a leader or for an organization than to strive for health.