If business books are your thing Patrick Lencioni is a must.

A born storyteller, Lencioni's bestsellers and globally popular books for leaders and managers sets out leadership lessons in fables.

Like Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince , each business fable weaves lessons into each chapter.

Not every business book of Lencioni's is set out this way, but some of the best are.

Ahead of Pat Lencioni's Australian live virtual event in February 2025, let's take a look at 5 of his 11 books, and the lesson or moral in each story.

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1. THE FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF A TEAM Told in the fable style, fictional CEO Kathryn Petersen and her new team at DecisionTech,Inc, are the embodiment of the politics and dysfunction often inherent in teams.

Lencioni says dysfunctions don't die easily, and making a team functional and cohesive requires levels of courage and discipline that many groups cannot seem to muster.

The 5 dysfunctions of a team are as follows:

The fear of being vulnerable with team members prevents the building of trust within the team.

The desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles the occurrence of productive ideological conflict.

The lack of clarity or buy-in prevents team members from making decisions they will stick to.

The need to avoid interpersonal discomfort prevents team members from holding one another accountable.

The pursuit of individual goals and personal status erodes the focus on collective success.

Lencioni says high performing, cohesive teams ask for help, admit mistakes and to limits and take risks offering feedback. They don't waste time talking about the wrong issues and revisiting the same topics over and over again because of lack of buy-in, and they retain star employees.

Casey McDaniel, is the fictional founder and CEO of Yip Software, a company beset by tortuous meetings. Will Peterson enters the fable, proposing a radical way to solve the meeting problem, and in doing so teaches us that bad meetings are not inevitable.

Lencioni says meetings should be both interesting and relevant in the lives of participants. He says if we can just turn everything we know about meetings upside down (i.e. replace agendas and decorum with passion and conflict) we can transform drudgery into meaningful advantage.

He advises the following meeting schedule:

Daily Check-in: Share daily schedules and activities.

Weekly Tactical: Review weekly activities and metrics, and resolve tactical obstacles and issues.

Monthly Strategic (or adhoc strategic): Discuss, analyse, brainstorm and decide upon critical issues affecting long term success.

Quarterly Off-site Review: Review strategy, competitive landscape, industry trends, key personnel, team development.

In The Advantage , Lencioni claims organisational health will surpass all other disciplines in business as the greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage.

He sets out a four-step process for improving organisational health.

1. The most critical is creating a cohesive leadership team. Without an aligned team at the top of an organisation, it will never come near to reaching its full potential.
2. Creating clarity or creating alignment at the executive level is essential to building and maintaining a healthy organisation. There is probably no greater frustration for employees than having to navigate the politics and confusion caused by leaders who are misaligned. They must align on Six Critical Questions: 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?
3. Reinforce clarity Organisational clarity (the six critical questions) must become embedded into the fabric of the organisation, across recruiting and hiring, managing performance, compensation and rewards and real-time recognition.
4. Overcommunicate clarity Once a leadership team has become cohesive and has established clarity around the six critical questions, they need to communicate the answers to employees over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It was reported that employees wont believe a leader's message until they've heard it seven times.

Lencioni provides leaders with powerful advice on how to eliminate the structural obstacles that derail organisations.

He urges leaders to provide a compelling context for their employees to work together, by setting out goals and objectives as follows:

Thematic Goal: The single, temporary, and qualitative rallying cry shared by all members of the team

Defining Objective: The temporary, qualitative components of the thematic goal; shared by all members of the team

Standard Operating Objectives: The ongoing priorities of the organization; shared by all members of the team

Lencioni claims an ideal team player embodies three virtues: humility, hunger and people smarts. He claims having team players with these attributes drastically accelerates and improves the process of building high-performing teams. Here are the three virtues spelled out.

Ideal team players are humble. They lack excessive ego or concerns about status. Humble people are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to seek attention for their own. They share credit, emphasise team over self and define success collectively rather than individually.

Ideal team players are hungry. They are always looking for more. More things to do. More to learn. More responsibility to take on. Hungry people almost never have to be pushed by a manager to work harder because they are self-motivated and diligent. They are constantly thinking about the next step and the next opportunity.

Ideal team players are smart. They have common sense about people. Smart people tend to know what is happening in a group situation and how to deal with others in the most effective way. They have good judgment and intuition around the subtleties of group dynamics and the impact of their words and actions

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