The Motive – Patrick Lencioni
Book Summaries

The Motive – Patrick Lencioni

Vikram Ramakrishnan

2 Kinds of Leaders

  • Reward centered
    1. They see the moving to leadership as a reward of what they’ve achieved so far and is a prize.
    2. Focus on the “glory”, “prestige”, “rewards” for achieving pinnacle of success
    3. They usually pick and choose what they want to do as leader and do what is usually something they feel they are good at or have fun.
  • Responsibility centered
    1. Look at this as a responsibility rather than reward.
    2. Don’t shy away from doing what is required for someone at this job
    3. The experience of being ‘responsibility centered‘ leader should be tough and challenging
    4. Look at this from the perspective of the people they lead, rather than themselves.
  • There’s no pure “Reward” / “Responsibility” focused Leader. People are usually in a spectrum. You need to ensure you are more aligned toward Responsibility centered.
  • Responsibility centered Leaders need to be aware of the Trap – when they are being responsibility centered leader, people tend to praise them and agree with them quite a lot and this can lead people to move down the path of Reward centered leadership.
    • Have a strong inner circle who can challenge and keep them honest

5 Core responsibilities

These are responsibilities that “Reward centered” Leaders usually ignore or don’t do well

  • Having difficult & uncomfortable conversations
    • Addressing Bad behavior immediately and not tolerating regardless of how good the direct report is at their job
    • Don’t avoid these hard conversations
  • Managing subordinates
    • Individual coaching and guidance is necessary at all levels. This has got nothing to do with the person’s experience.
    • If you feel you should be able to trust people to manage themselves, or justify not knowing what your direct reports are doing by justifying not being a micromanager, then your motive for leading is wrong.
    • Micromanagement — the only people who call management, micromanagement are the ones trying to avoid accountability.
    • As a leader, you need to
      • Know what they are working on
      • Know their progress
      • Give them the right feedback and coaching
    • Lots of experience doesn’t mean people don’t have to be managed. It’s not sign of punishment or lack of trust. It’s giving them the benefit of direction and coaching.
    • Best of sportsmen pay people to coach them.
    • Stopping managing is a sign of neglect.
  • Running great team meetings
    • Running boring meetings / avoiding them
    • Outcome based meetings
    • If you allow in-effective meetings to happens, this will percolate to entire org
    • Bad Meetings == Bad decisions
  • Developing Leadership team
    • If you feel this is something touchy-feely and waste of time, then your motive for being a leader isn’t right.
    • Hiring != delegating to HR
    • It’s not just a annual meeting or gala for team building
  • Communicating constantly & repeatedly
    • Research says it takes 7 times for people to hear the same message before believe execs are serious about it.
    • CEOs need to be Chief Reminding Officers
    • You always need to over communicate.

Quotes & References

  • It’s about doing the job, not having the job.
  • CEO is not Chief Executive Officer , it is Chief Executing officer.
  • When deciding on picking up a certain role ask yourself
    • Why do you want to do the thing that __ does? (CEO/VP/Director etc)
    • Why do you still want to be _____ ? (CEO/VP/Director etc)