Patrick Lencioni on Leadership Courage and the Future of Hybrid Work

Episode #309 Patrick Lencioni on Leadership Courage and the Future of Hybrid Work

TRANSCRIPT:

Martin G. Moore (Marty):

Let me just start with one of the big topics at the moment, which is remote and hybrid work. We still see so much about this in the media all the time.

Now, I’ve got pretty strong views about the effectiveness of leadership interactions. I believe that the eyeball-to-eyeball interaction is inordinately more effective than doing things remotely, and I have a preference for this. But I also think that there’s something to be said for balance and you need to find a way to cater to your employees, but we’re getting weird in places, right.

I know in Australia, the labor unions over there are doing things like negotiating for extra allowances to be paid if you want your employees, their members, to turn up in person, and I think this is probably a little bit beyond the pale.

How do you think about this difficult balance, both in the Fortune 500 companies you work in and in your own business?

Patrick Lencioni (Pat):

Well, I think you and I are very similar in this regard. When unions do something that … I just don’t … That’s not good for, it’s actually not good for the individuals, for their dignity and enjoyment, I think.

I will tell you, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I would’ve been the radical saying, “Hey, listen, people can have more flexibility. If they need to work one day from home, let them do that. If their kids have something, they should have … If they need to commute later because, to avoid the commute, let’s be flexible, because it shouldn’t be about following a rigid set of rules. It should be about getting the work done.”

Marty: I couldn’t agree more..

Pat: Now, over these last five years, the pendulum has swung all the other way. It’s like, we don’t even have to be together, and there are people that have gotten out of college in the last four years that have never had a job where they went into the office.

My first two years out of college, all of my learning was by being with people, and so I think that it’s really gone, now I’m a radical the other way, saying, “Get people back into work.”

Keep the flexibility, and here we’re talking, you’re in Boston today, I’m here in California, we can talk this way. You’re from Australia, we’ve always believed that technology was a great way to make the world smaller, but to prevent somebody from actually sitting down and having a three-dimensional conversation, not to mention the fact that not only is the conversation not as good when it’s not in person, but what about all the stuff that happens in between.

When you think about your career and the ideas and the, it’s people after the meeting, “Hey, I was thinking about something,” or they run into each other in the hallway. None of that is happening now.

I know that this, when people say, hey, I get to say this on your podcast, because it’s very good, when people say, “Oh, but our productivity is the same and we’re not together.” That is bullshit.

Marty: For sure..

Pat: It’s just not true.

Marty: Yeah, that’s right. Look, I still think you’ve got to be quite selective about what you do when you get people together, because the instinct I think of many leaders, particularly if they’re not quite as confident or secure, is that they’ll call people in just so they can see what they’re doing, and that’s never been a great way to lead, right, because you want to lead for outcomes, not lead for inputs.

I always advocate now that, okay, when you get people together, make it meaningful and do the things that you can’t do when you’re just working on remote tasks.

Pat: Exactly, and there are companies that are remote, that are more productive than companies that aren’t, because there are plenty of people that do work together and they’re just dysfunctional and they don’t get anything done, and it’s micromanagement, all that other stuff.

We’re not trying to say that it’s one thing versus the other, but all other things being equal, the company that comes together regularly is getting things done and making discoveries and building better relationships and their productivity is better, there’s no doubt about that.

Marty: Yeah, right. Look, interestingly, I think it’s a structural shift, but I can’t quite work out how close we are to getting into steady state. If you think about this on a company by company basis, the companies you work with, the big ones over here in the US, how do you actually see this settling down? Has the dust settled yet, or do we still have a ways to go before people are comfortable where things have landed?

Pat: I think it’s geography and industry that is probably, that’s my guess. Certain states, the coasts are far less, people in the South, the Midwest, the heart of America, this is America, are much more likely to want to be together.

I think they value interpersonal relationships and those things, but the high-tech corridor and the finance and all that stuff, I think they’re like, “Oh, we need to,” I don’t know that they understand the human dimension.

I will say this, my books have always been more popular. They’re popular everywhere now, but it took a long time before the technology world and the high finance, because they were always interested in super intellectual things, and so it’s nice to be able to go, “Oh, I don’t believe people, they can be at home and get as much done.”

The truth is, human beings don’t work that way, and so I don’t know what in different countries it is, but I find that in theory it doesn’t need to happen, and so I think the more, I don’t know, overly intellectual industries are still trying to figure this out, whereas a lot of the mom-and-pop things are just like, “Come on, you’re coming to work. We got to sit down and talk and we got to get things done.” That’s just my thinking.

Now, Australia is an interesting one because, and boy, Australia, what an interesting conversation. What happened in Australia during COVID, is just unprecedented.

I know, we can have a long conversation about the culture, and many of the things we thought about Australia, where it turned out different, I know the country is really struggling with this. I don’t know what’s happening there in terms of people embracing the idea of coming back to work or if there’s still that lockdown sense of, “Oh, let’s not make people do that.” I mean, I would ask you what is it like there?

Marty: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of both. I haven’t been working in the Australian market for a couple of years, but I think, if I was going to describe the differences just generally, between the US and Australia, I’d say the US has much more focus on the individual rights and freedoms of people, whereas Australia is much more geared towards the collective good. I think that’s probably the thing that differentiates Australian and American culture the most. Of course, in the US it’s not one country, it’s 50 states, we know that.

I guess I’ve seen different things, depending on company size and industry, as you said, Pat, I think it’s the same over there. One thing that occurred to me as you were speaking though about this is, do you find that, with that sense of community, that more competitive industries are more likely to adopt new working technologies, than are the more gregarious customer focused industries?

Pat: Oh, that’s so interesting. Wow, this is fascinating, because I would say, yes, but I think not coming together and having people come back to work is not actually about leaning into technology, it’s about wimping out in what’s demanded from people. Because technology is great, do you know what I mean?

Marty: Yeah, totally.

Pat: The really competitive ones were probably using video technology before, to interact with customers and everything, but now it’s become, “Oh, I guess we can’t make people do things they don’t want.”

The really competitive ones are going to go, “Well, screw that. Because if they don’t want to come to work, then probably this isn’t the most driven person.”

I actually think, what’s good about this time is, if you say to people, “Hey, listen, we’re going to come back to work. Okay, we’re going to do it four days a week, and you’re going to continue to have flexibility around your family, but the deliverables are going to be high.”

If people opt out, you’re probably going to get the right ones to opt out. That’s the hard thing about unions, it’s like, gosh, unionized businesses, and I understand why unions need to exist in some cases, but I think they protect the lowest performers so often.

Marty: Oh, yes, they certainly drive everyone to the lowest common denominator, there’s no doubt about that. Look, I was fortunate, I think, to work in some heavily industrialized businesses in Australia, and that gave me a really good sense of the difference between what a unionized business looks like, and one that’s just driven by leadership.

Of course, the reason unions exist and flourish is because leadership is poor, and so as a substitute for that people feel as though they need that protection and advocacy that they can’t get in the relationship with their leaders.

Pat: Exactly, exactly. The best teachers don’t benefit from the teachers unions, they get frustrated that they can’t do the things they want to do. In many industries, that to me don’t seem like they need to be unionized, it’s the people that are in the union that explain that to me.

Then, you’re right, these industrial, because in a coal mine, management was so bad, the unions came in and said, “We got to protect these people,” and God bless them for doing that.

I wish today we applied it in a lot more, what’s really in the best good of the people and the industry and the customers and the employees, rather than how do we protect the lowest denominator?

Marty: Absolutely! I guess you’ve led very, very nicely segue-wise into the concept of leadership courage.

Just having the strength to say, “Well, hang on a minute, we want to work with you and we want to have flexible arrangements, but our operational requirement is that you turn up here for a certain amount of time to do your job, because that’s how we’re going to get the best results for the company.”

I was fascinated by a podcast episode of yours, At The Table, that I heard a little while ago, where you spoke about courage in leadership, particularly the three types of courage.

Now, this was completely a new concept to me, I hadn’t thought about it before, and I believe that when you recorded that episode, it was a relatively new concept in your team as well, with your panel.

Have you had more time to think about it, and would you like to just explain and describe what the three types of courage are?

Pat: This is going to be so fun, because people are going to see a very real conversation. Talk about no bullshit leadership! I don’t remember what the three are. Now, and I even saw-

Marty: Excellent.

Pat: My son, Matt said, “Hey, he’s going to ask you about that.” I forgot to look at it, because this is brand new, and as soon as you tell me one of them, I’m going to go, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the three types of courage.” This is so new.

Marty: Hey mate, I can clue you in. Do you want me to play the guessing game, where I give you one and you’ve got to get the other two?

Pat: Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s do that. Let’s see if I can remember it.

Marty: Right, so there’s public courage.

Pat: Oh, yes, yes, now I remember it, that’s what I needed. Okay, so public courage. I love this, thank you. True, no bullshit. Oh, I’m going to pretend, I just didn’t remember it.

Public courage is the one we think about. You see it in movies, you see, I’m going to get up in public and I’m going to say, “I believe in this.” Every hero in a movie and historical figures have had public courage.

A lot of people will say, “Oh, is that what it means to be courageous as a leader?” Sometimes it is, but there are certain people that are like, “Well, I don’t know if that’s my persona, or.” That’s actually probably the least important or the least common.

The one that’s most important is what I call interpersonal courage. Interpersonal courage is what you do when you’re sitting around a table with two people or three people, and you have to say, “I disagree, and let’s talk about that. Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation. Or I don’t think you’re doing this in this way, or I’m questioning whether you buy into our values or.”

Those are the things, I think in our society there is so little interpersonal courage, and I think social media has divided people, and people are willing to say something mean on social media or even go to a protest and yell at somebody anonymously, but they don’t sit down and go, “Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you’re wrong, let’s talk about it.” I think that we are wimps when it comes to having real conversations about things.

Now, the third kind of courage is required for both of these, and that is what I call individual courage, which is when you look in the mirror and you say, “Who am I? Am I really going to step up and do this? Am I going to choose the political route? Am I going to protect myself, or am I going to be honest with myself?”

It all starts there, and I think that … But the thing that I struggle with the most in organizations and in society is, how few people are willing to have hard conversations with one another, with grace and love, but without fear.

I find that people will affirm people falsely and not tell them the truth, and then go talk about them behind their back. Man, I think our world is suffering as a result of that, and our organizations are too.

Marty: I couldn’t agree more, and Pat, this concept of self-courage or individual courage being the baseline, you can’t walk away from that, it is what it is.

I always get really interested by public courage, because I think people do different things for different reasons, and sometimes public courage can be a show of, I don’t know, I hesitate to use the term virtue signaling, but it’s what we want the world to see of us.

I think sometimes public courage doesn’t have the foundation of individual courage that’s really required to make it consistently work, and so as long as you’re worried about what other people are thinking, that’s going to be there somewhere in the back of your mind.

Whereas the interpersonal courage, that’s the hardest thing to get right, because you get to choose whether you do something, and no one really knows whether you are or not, it’s only you that knows.

Having these one-on-one conversations that people might need to hear, some sort of observation you may be able to give them about one of their weaknesses they need to improve if they want to move forward in their careers, or talking about a behavioral element of their performance that isn’t acceptable to what you’re doing in your organization.

All of these things require an individual to say, “Okay, I’m going to choose to have this conversation. I’m going to put my self-interest, my fears and my apprehension aside, because that’s what this person needs to hear.” That’s what I think really lacks, but you’ve seen a lot of this, so how do you view that whole interpersonal / public space?

Pat: Well, it’s so interesting, because most of us think it’s the other way. I talk to this priest, I know him, I’m Catholic. A dear man, and he has personal, he believes what he believes. He has the courage to stand up at the podium and give hard sermons or homilies, and challenge people in good ways, loving ways, but he’ll give a message that’s hard. Then, what he doesn’t do is call the people that work for him on things that they need to do better.

I really admire him, because I’ve talked to him about that. I said, “Father, why don’t you channel the courage you have, that you do from the podium, to when you go to the office and you see somebody not doing what they’re doing?”

He said, “Pray for me, because I need courage.” Because he knows that it is a lack of courage, but he can stand up in front of a thousand people and say something.

I think it’s because when you do it publicly, you don’t really get rejected one-on-one, whereas when you do it individually, that person might look at you, they might cry, they might get angry, they might say, “I don’t think that’s fair,” and you have to deal with that.

I just think it’s one of those things, we should all audit ourselves and say, “Which of these am I best at? Which am I second, and which am I third, and how do I go about working on that?”

It does start with, am I vulnerable enough to admit that I’m wimpy, in this case, or I’m afraid?

Marty: Look, I think that is phenomenal in terms of self-awareness, from the priest that you’re talking about, because I think one of the things that really holds us back is our almost limitless power of rationalization.

Of course, for a leader who knows deep down they need to step into a conversation that might be difficult, they can find a thousand reasons to not do it, and it’s that rationalization and the ability to kick the can down the road that stops a lot of people, not only from being courageous, but from having the self-awareness that makes them realize that they’re not being courageous.

Pat: Oh, Marty, that is such an insightful comment. Because most, I’ve done a lot of work with priests and pastors and churches, because they struggle, because they think they’re always supposed to be nice. When it comes, and it’s not kind and loving not to tell somebody something they need to do to improve in their life or in their work.

What I find most of them self, they rationalize, they go, “Oh, but that person, who am I to say that?” Or, “I don’t really have authority over them,” or, “I’m busy.”

I love that this one said, “I don’t have courage, pray for me to have more courage.” Because it’s like, okay, that’s vulnerable and that’s honest, and you want to do it and you’re struggling, so I love that self-rationalization  that people do.

I once went to a bishop, I said to him, and this is a guy in the church, and I was doing some work, I said, “Why don’t you call your brother bishop, in this other diocese, in this other place, on stuff that he’s not doing?” He said to me, “Because he might call me on my stuff.” I thought, “But you should want him to do that.”

Yeah, we can rationalize why we don’t want to do it, and I think most of the time, if we just admit it was like, “Because I don’t want to have …” I think the avoidance of uncomfortable conversations, Marty, is one of the core issues in our society, in marriage, in work, in teams and in society in general.

People don’t want to have hard conversations, but they will write a flaming email or they will do something destructive, but they just don’t want to sit down and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this.”

Marty: Oh, absolutely. In fact, I call that the number one career killer, is the inability to handle conflict like that. I really zoned in on that very, very carefully, very directly.

Pat: The leader has to invite it and demand it, and if the leader doesn’t want to have difficult conversations, it’s way too much to ask everybody else to do it. It’s got to come from the top.

Marty: For sure, it has to be modeled, and it has to be made important, so that you’re constantly talking to your direct reports about it: “What conversations have you had? Have you spoken to this person about X, Y or Z?”

Look, Pat, I’ve got to tell you, one of the most heartbreaking things I ever saw in my executive career was coming across people who had years and years and years and years of life in a particular organization, and no one had ever given them some feedback on something that was blindingly obvious.

To sit down and say to someone who’s 45, 50, 55 years old, “I’ve made this observation and it’s holding you back,” and to have a really connected conversation with them.

Just the way they shut down and fold their arms and say, “Mate, I’ve got 20 years of performance reviews that say I’m doing a bang up job. Now you come along and tell me I’ve got this problem. It’s not me, it’s you.”

That to me, I don’t find that offensive, I find it heartbreaking, that someone can go through their whole career, and if they had one leader with the courage to tell them something they needed to hear, it could have changed their trajectory totally, both their career and their lives.

Pat: Well, and this is so interesting and fun, I love this conversation. We should record this, Marty, and put it on a podcast.

This is one of the things I find in leaders, and I share this too, by the way. Having a difficult conversation and holding somebody accountable and saying, “Hey, this is an area you need to improve on.” For years, I struggled with that, and so many CEO’s do.

They’ll say, “Well, I fire people all the time, so I don’t have a problem with accountability.” I’m like, “No, no, no, accountability begins with the difficult conversation, and the next one and the next one, before you have to get to that point.”

The idea that we don’t do that, I used to think it was because I was a nice person, or better yet, I used to think I was a kind person. One day I realized that it was actually an act of selfishness, when I deprive people of something they could improve, in order to protect myself from them disliking me or blaming me in that moment.

When I realized, “Oh, I’m not loving them by protecting them from this, I’m loving myself.” Then hopefully, a bunch of leaders will go, “Oh, I don’t want to be selfish. If that’s selfish, I won’t do it.” Then the others are going to go, “Oh, no, yeah, I am selfish. I don’t really care if they improve, I just don’t want to struggle with that.”

Well, I think there’s a whole bunch of people with good intentions that are avoiding having difficult conversations, and if they realized it was cruel to not tell somebody, then I think they would probably do it.

Marty: Oh, absolutely, and I think we find similar distinctions between the concepts of empathy and sympathy. People hide behind the tag of empathy, which is critical to have as a leader, and my personal view is, you should have boundless empathy, there’s no such thing as too much empathy. As long as you are strong and you don’t let it morph into sympathy.

A lot of leaders use that as an excuse to be weak or to give concessions and to drop the standard, just because they say, “I’m being an empathetic leader.”

Pat: Yes, and it’s so funny. It’s, I can empathize with them and I can empathize the fact that they need this badly, so let me approach them in a way that’s dignifying, but that doesn’t deprive them of the difficult … I mean, there’s a reason why so many people talk about tough love.

We talk about it in the world of faith, as I said, I’m a follower of Jesus, but love involves truth and grace, and if you take either of them out, it becomes cruelty.

You deprive a person of the truth of what they need to hear, that’s cruel. Of course, we know that saying something mean to them, that’s true, but in a harsh way, that’s cruel too.

If you don’t have both, you can’t say you love somebody, and I hope everybody who’s a leader says, “Yeah, I love, even when I don’t like them, I love the people I lead.” Because that’s really what leadership is, it’s, “I love them enough to suffer for their benefit.”

Marty: Oh, that’s beautiful, I love that. “I love them enough to suffer for their benefit”.

It’s interesting though, to see industries that pride themselves on the tough truth without the love, and the one that comes to mind for me immediately is mining. I know you’ve-

Pat: Oh, I was going to say, because there’s not very many, there’s those, yeah, okay.

Marty: There’s a couple, right. I remember, in fact, the early 2000’s, when I went into a mining company as the chief information officer, I remember having some of these conversations where some of these general managers I was working with as customers internally, were brutal, absolutely brutal.

I’d look at them and they’d go, “Well, we call it the way we see it here. We tell the truth, and we’re tough and we’re direct, and that’s the way it is, so if you don’t like it…” type thing.

That was the truth and the directness, but in a brutal way. It wasn’t in a loving or connected or compassionate way, and so I felt the difference, and what you say is so true.

Pat: Yeah, yeah, and people that justify that, it’s not hard to convince them wrong, it’s like, “Do you really think they’re going to hear that truth when there’s no grace at all?”

The funny thing is, in our society, for every mining company, there’s 99 other companies today that are like, “Oh, well, I don’t think we need to tell them, and they might feel bad, and the union might get mad if we tell them, and I don’t want to be unpopular.”

What they don’t realize is, to convince somebody that withholding the truth is actually cruel, it’s just so much easier for people to justify that. It’s way more fun to watch a movie or hear a story about the other side.

Marty: It totally is, isn’t it?

Pat: Do you know what, I have to tell you, the computer chip manufacturer, Intel, you know about Intel?

Marty: Of course, yeah.

Pat: Well, Andy Grove was the CEO, and he was a fantastic CEO back then, he was a big reason why that company did so well. He taught people, now, I love the way they did it, because they actually, when they hired people and onboarded them, they actually taught them what was going to go on.

They would go into meetings and be really tough on each other, but they prepared people for that. You’d go to a meeting and people would go, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard, that’s ridiculous.”

They said, “We’re going to do that, so when we leave, we’re going to be like, ‘Oh, all right, good meeting. We’re all bought in, we’re not going to talk about each other in the parking lot.'”

If you just looked at a snapshot of the meetings, they looked cruel, but in fact, it was in the spirit of, let’s get it out now so we don’t go on and hurt each other later.

Well, somebody called me from that company a while back and said, “Yeah, we’re trying to undo that.” I was like, “No, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” That’s good, teach people how to do that in a way where they understand where it’s coming from.

In this world today, it’s like, Oh, no, people are going to have their feelings hurt,” and it’s like, oh.

Marty: Well, yeah, which is not kind at all.

Pat: No.

Marty: As we know. This goes back to the themes that come right through your books, right from the earliest ones I’ve read. This is the concept of the constructive conflict and the tension that comes from that, and the value that that liberates.

It’s so incredibly important to have people who are prepared to put their views on the table, and as I used to say in one of my executive teams, “Let’s get all the dead cats on the table and talk about them. We don’t want that discussion around the water cooler when you’re pointing to someone else’s cat. Let’s get them all on the table and let’s work out what’s going on.”

To have that robust conversation, that doesn’t become personal, because as you know, high performing teams, sometimes you’re just playing referee, dragging people off each other, and the top best performers you’ll ever have are single minded and driven and focused, and as I like to say, “Often wrong, never in doubt.”

Managing a team like that is really hard, but if you can do it in a way that doesn’t let it become personal, it’s the most incredible octane fuel that you can put into a tank of performance, I believe.

Pat: I totally agree.

Marty: So, keeping that constructive tension is so important. With the concept of, I just want to backtrack just a minute, because one of the things-

Pat: Well, can I say something, Marty?

Marty: Of course.

Pat: Because what you said is so powerful, and I think we need to … The only way for that to be possible, the only way for people to actually embrace the octane power of conflict, of non-personal conflict, is if you’ve built vulnerability based trust.

That is, you have to know, Marty, if you and I are going to build that trust with each other, I mean, if we’re going to have that conflict, I have to know that if I say something that’s compelling, that you’re going to go, “Oh, wait a second, you’re right.”

Or if I’m rude to you, and afterward I can go, “Oh, I’m sorry, I was a dick. I was just frustrated, but I hope you know I care about you, and I’m sorry I really did that.” Or even, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do, and I feel really vulnerable in admitting that, because that could look bad, but I just don’t know the answer.”

When you know that the other people on your team are not only capable of, but really interested in being completely vulnerable with each other, then you can have an argument, because you know that the moment they say something compelling or that you do, people will go, “Oh, okay, you’re right, I’m sorry. I didn’t get it.”

If you don’t think they’re vulnerable, why would you get into an argument with somebody that could never admit they were wrong, or that they made a mistake or they had something to learn? We always, instead of going and teaching executives how to have conflict, we start by saying, “Are you willing to be buck naked with each other? Are you willing to say, ‘I can be a jerk sometimes, or I was wrong, or I didn’t know the answer.'”

I love what you said about frequently wrong, but never in doubt. It’s like, no, when you’re in doubt, if you can’t go, “Hey, I’m in doubt,” you can’t argue with somebody like that, so teaching somebody those skills is just getting them to be better at manipulation.

Marty: Totally, it’s amazing, isn’t it? Well, I think as leaders go up and up the chain and get to the top of organizations, many of them have more to protect. They have more that they need to defend, in terms of their own image and their political bases and everything else.

I find that sometimes pushes them into the place where they can’t be seen to be wrong, which is a terrible thing, because the best executives are the ones who go, “Actually, that’s a really good idea,” and they can change their mind on a dime when better information is presented.

Not the flighty, insecure, I don’t know where I’m going, jumping around the place or knee-jerking, but just that ability to look at the information on the table, treat it for what it is, and be confident and strong enough to change when you need to.

Pat: To celebrate the fact that somebody came up with that idea and not them. When they can go, “Wow, I don’t know, I couldn’t have come up with that. I certainly didn’t, you did that. I love that idea, let’s do your idea.” Then, here’s the irony of being a great leader. Then, if it doesn’t go well saying, “I decided to adopt that idea, that’s not your fault.”

In other words, and I don’t mean this in a falsely humble way, but really give credit to others and then take responsibility when things go wrong. People will walk through walls of fire for a leader who will do that, but if you’re the kind of leader that takes credit for other people’s ideas or is threatened by them, and then shifts the blame to somebody else, oh my gosh, they’re not going to walk through a wall of mist for you.

Marty: Absolutely. I agree with you 99% here, Pat, I just want to pull one-

Pat: Oh, I love it, let’s argue.

Marty: Yeah, well, one outlier example, right. I believe in, 100% back your people, this is not completely unconditional, as long as they operate with the right intent and they stay within the guardrails you’ve given them.

Pat: Oh, yeah, yeah. That requires vulnerability on their part.

Marty: Yeah. If they go outside and they operate either with bad intent or they specifically go against the directions you’ve given them, they’ve burnt themselves, they’ve lost the right to have that air cover that’s unconditional.

Completely in terms of providing the air cover, making sure people know that you’ll have their back, and that every leader, in my view, is accountable for everything that happens on their watch. It doesn’t matter whether the organization is 50,000 people in 20 countries and seven layers deep, you own everything, everything.

Pat: You need to make sure that a person has earned the right to be in that organization, by being willing to be vulnerable enough to be on a team. In other words, because what you said, it’s not unconditional, everybody who works for me, I’ll take … If anything you have to say, “I’ve allowed them.”

There’s two kinds of sin. In the Bible there’s the sin of commission, where you do something wrong, and the sin of omission, where you don’t do something about something that you see.

So often in an organization, you’re the leader, and you go, “Yeah, I see political behavior there, or I see somebody not doing the right thing.” Like you said, they haven’t earned the … And it’s like, I let that happen, and I didn’t call it out.

Now you are responsible for that, but the first time you see somebody doing something like that, then you go, “Oh, no, no, I’m not going to say, I’m going to tell you, you’re going to have to change your behavior there, because that’s not okay here.”

Yeah, it’s not like, “I’m always wrong if something goes bad and everything,” that’s silly. I totally get what … People have to earn the right to be there by being capable of vulnerability, and being willing to put themselves out there.

Marty: Sure, and if we think about the depth of these larger organizations and how many layers of leaders there are, how hard is it to get the right culture and performance and the right basics in place universally, through a team of leaders that might be six layers deep?

Pat: Well, here’s what we … And it’s a great question, and it’s almost overwhelming to think about it. It’s like, how in the world can I do it? Because imagine you’re sitting at the top of a, not a pyramid, but an org chart, and you have seven direct reports, and every one of them has seven direct reports, and everyone there has seven.

I don’t even know the permutations and combinations, how many of that is, but here’s what we always say, “Worry about two groups, the people that work for you.” The moment you compromise on holding somebody accountable for being vulnerable and being willing to engage in trust. Trust, it’s really about trust. When you compromise on any of those people, the vortex effect of that is massive.

If you’re the leader, if you can just say, “I’m going to worry about my team, and then I’m going to make sure that my team cascades that to their team.” Those two levels, if you get that right, it is going to be really hard for somebody to introduce bad behavior in there, because they’re going to get found out.

When a CEO says, “Well, I believe these things, but two of my direct reports don’t.” Well, there’s going to be people, three, four, five, six levels below, and then you’re going to come to me and go, “Oh, we have a problem with middle management.” I always tell them the same thing, it’s like, “Actually, it always starts up here.”

Marty: Totally.

Pat: It’s usually a sin of omission.

Marty: 90% of the time, for sure it’s a sin of omission.

Pat: “Well, Fred, I know Fred can be a jerk, and he doesn’t admit when he’s wrong, but he’s really good at what he does, and I don’t think it’s that big of a problem.” It’s like, “Well, not up here you don’t think so, but you know what it looks like two levels below?”

Marty: Oh, for sure. Once again, the power of rationalization, right. It’s so easy to have a pretty good direct report cache, and then you’ve got this one exception who’s not doing the job, but well, he’s a really good person, been here for 20 years, everyone loves him, he runs the Fantasy Football League, what a great guy, right.

You think that’s an exception, but everyone else looks at it and goes, “That’s the standard.” Pat, this conversation has been absolutely fascinating, and-

Pat: I know, what a blast.

Marty: I really, really wanted to let you know how much I appreciate your openness and generosity in the conversation, because not all interviews are like that as you well know.

I’ve had a heap of fun, and to talk to one of the people that I consider to be a global thought leader, par excellence, someone who has made a real difference to generational leadership, it’s been an absolute privilege and an honor for me to interview with you and spend this time. Patrick Lencioni, thank you so much.

Pat: I’ve had a blast. Thank you. God bless you, Marty.