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The 5 Temptations (and remedies) of a CEO

The 5 Temptations of a CEO - Patrick Lencioni

Not these temptations!

A 1 minute summary of Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Temptations of a CEO:The 5 Temptations:

  1. You put your own career status ahead of getting results for the organisation.
  2. You want to be popular with your team instead of holding them accountable for delivering on the commitments that drive results.
  3. You want to ensure your decisions are correct to achieve certainty which means despite being willing to hold people accountable, you don’t because you don’t think it’s fair.
  4. You desire harmony in your team rather than passionate ideological conflict (not personal attacks) which means that you haven’t benefited from the best sources of information available to you – your team.
  5. You desire invulnerability rather than vulnerability which means your ideas (and others’) don’t get challenged and your team just goes along with what they think your opinion is.
Fortunately, as well as detailing the 5 above, Patrick shares some simple advice to remedy the temptations.

 Patrick’s 5 simple pieces of advice for CEOs to counteract the temptations:

  1. Make results the most important measure of personal success, or step down from the job.
  2. Work for the long term respect of your direct reports, not for their affection. …View…them as key employees who must deliver on their commitments if the company is going to produce predictable results. And remember, your people aren’t going to like you anyway if they ultimately fail.
  3. Make clarity more important than accuracy. The cost to you of being wrong is pride. The cost to your company of not taking the risk of being wrong is paralysis.
  4. Tolerate discord. Encourage your direct reports to air their ideological differences, and with passion. Tumultuous meetings are often signs of progress.
  5. Actively encourage your people to challenge your ideas. Trust them with your reputation and your ego.

In the vein of Marshall Goldsmith’s “What got you here, won’t get you there”, The 5 Temptations of a CEO, forced me to take a look in the mirror. Result = opportunity to improve!My temptations:I feel the temptation I most succumb to is #2 – a want to be popular among my team rather than holding each accountable. I spoke with Adam about this a while ago before I read this book and his advice was spot on – it’s not what you say but how you say it. Holding people accountable means being clear with what is expected and then demanding great performance. It doesn’t mean you have to rant and rave. In the self assessment section of the book, he says that this temptation often manifests itself in comments such as “When will these people stop questioning us and start understanding what we are trying to do?”.We’ve just set up our scorecards (How to create Scorecards for Topgrading) with outcomes and deadlines for each of us. I think they will be fantastic opportunities to practice my resolve to turn this temptation around.#4 is the second one I succumb to – the desire for harmony. Being a debate maker is a crucial skill to master in becoming a Multiplier. With a clear understanding of what outcome we are trying to produce, debate helps to extract all of the information in order to make the best decisions. There are plenty of opportunities to practice this in our weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings.This was an awesome fable by Patrick Lencioni. I read it in an hour and a half on the beach and now I’ve spent another hour and a half re-reading sections.I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to this post many times.

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