Last week Scott Williams wrote several blog posts summarizing the sessions he attended at the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit, including one on a session led by Patrick Lencioni on the importance of organizational health. Lencioni is the author of ten business books and president of The Table Group, where he focuses on writing and speaking about leadership and organizational life.
Williams shares Lencioni’s six questions every organization must ask and answer when seeking clarity:
- Why do we exist?
- How do we behave?
- What do we do?
- How will we succeed?
- What is most important, right now?
- Who must do what
So What?
These questions are from discipline 2 (create clarity) of Lencioni’s latest book: The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else (2012). Interestingly this discipline is followed by two others: overcommunicate clarity and reinforce clarity. Clarity is an essential component in organizational (and congregational) health.
- How well does your congregation do when it comes to organizational clarity? Who/what group(s) is responsible for creating clarity? for communicating it? for reinforcing it?
- Share some of the benefits of organizational/congregational clarity for a community of faith.
- Share an example of a congregation you have been a part of that was either highly effective or highly ineffective in the area of clarity.