The main ideas of the book:

• More than anything, organizations should strive for organizational health.
• This book clearly and powerfully explains what your organization needs to do to become healthy:
  1. Build a cohesive leadership team
  2. Create clarity
  3. Overcommunicate clarity
  4. Reinforce clarity.

Why I chose this book:

If you want to truly transform your school, district, or organization, it won’t happen with a new curriculum, a new initiative, or a new technology, it will start with the people. And I’ve found Lencioni to be one of the most insightful observers of how people interact within organizations and how they can learn to be at their best.

While much of the language and examples in Lencioni’s work are geared toward businesses, this book focuses entirely on organizational health – something I believe schools desperately need right now.

Since the pandemic, schools have been facing a variety of challenges from staff vacancies and student disengagement to loss of essential funds. These and other issues have led to school not always being a place where the adults or students want to be. We urgently need some ideas – that have been successful in countless organizations – to strengthen school culture and bring back the passion that brought so many of us into the field of education in the first place.

•   The four disciplines you need to develop to build a healthy organization
•   Discipline 1: Build a coherent leadership team – Why you need trust, healthy conflict, accountability, and more
•   Discipline 2: Create clarity – How leadership teams drive the organization’s clarity by answering six critical questions
•   Discipline 3: Overcommunicate clarity – How to use a technique that combines bottom-up and top-down communication
•   Discipline 4: Reinforce clarity – Why you must create systems that reinforce the values and purpose of the organization
•   The Main Idea’s professional learning suggestions for strengthening and growing your leadership team