The Four Obsession of an Extraodinary Executive

If I were to ask the question, what makes a great leader, I’m sure I’d get a plethora of different answers.  I’d also put money on it that very few people would answer the question the way Patrick Lencioni did in his book The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive.  As is nearly always the case with Lencioni, his ideas are incredibly simple in theory but very difficult to have the discipline to fully embrace them and put them in to practice. 

Lencioni’s 4 obsessions can be summed up like this:  be cohesive, be clear, over communicate, and reinforce.  I’d like to touch on each of these obsessions very quickly.

Extraordinary executives know how to develop a cohesive team and spend much of their time doing so.  Not only do successful leaders tend to attract great people but they also take time to develop and engage them.  At the end of the day, when people work well together, results tend to follow regardless of the individual talent or ability of each team member.  Getting people to work together and interact well with each other is Lencioni’s first obsession for an extraordinary executive.

The next three obsessions build on each other and each has to do with communication. With this in mind the second obsession is establishing clarity.  Clarity is so critical to success because if things aren’t clear, people become frustrated and tend to waste a lot of time.  Making sure everyone understands the purpose of what they are doing, how they fit in, and what the ultimate goal is of the organization is so important.  For this reason extraordinary executives focus lots of time on it. 

Once the clarity is established the next obsession of an extraordinary executive is to over-communicate this clarity.  Though it becomes repetitive and old, great executives never tire of communicating the most critical messages and making sure they are clear.  Many ordinary executives find it hard or sometimes just plain boring to have the discipline to repeat the same messages over and over again. 

And finally, once clarity has been over-communicated an extraordinary executive reinforces that clarity through multiple means and channels.  Whether in memos, meetings, banquets, Christmas cards, or messages to the press, extraordinary executives finds ways to reinforce his or her most important messages over and over again in a variety of different ways.  People learn differently and react or understand different kinds of communication in different ways.  For this reason, reinforcing the clarity in all that we do helps an executive become extraordinary.   

These four obsessions when practiced well, lead to what the author calls organizational health, which is a huge competitive advantage for any organization.  As is the case in many of his works, Lencioni points out that rather than being smart, being healthy should be at the top of every leader’s priority list for their company.  The extraordinary executive understands this and therefore is obsessed with doing things that will help his or her organization become healthy.            

So what makes a leader great?  Really committing to a few simple disciplines. Though it is not always easy to identify what successful executive or leader do, I believe anyone who follows Lencioni’s advice in this book will be much much closer to becoming extraordinary.