Patrick Lencioni Quotes

I can assure you we are all strong-willed, forceful personalities and the president encourages vigorous debate.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it's at a party or it's in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

If three come together let them pick a leader.

Disagreement on issues doesn't mean 'dissension.' All it means is that honest men can differ in their approach. You lay out your positions, and president makes a decision.

The best kind of accountability on a team is peer-to-peer. Peer pressure is more efficient and effective than going to the leader, anonymously complaining, and having them stop what they are doing to intervene.

I have a team who I respect immensely, so if they have opinions, I'm interested in hearing them.

On great teams - the kind where people trust each other, engage in open conflict, and then commit to decisions - team members have the courage and confidence to confront one another when they see something that isn't serving the team.

If you are trying to get people to work on a problem together, it's best if they don't know where you, as the supervisor/manager, stand on the question.

Collaborative decision-making is very poor in crises.

There is no more great men; there is only great committees.

Most bands don't work out. A small unit democracy is very, very difficult.

If we had had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

I think I used to do everything and then people had a problem with that within the band, so we're doing more of a communal thing.

I was often misquoted. I was supportive of my managers, even though they all may not think so.

A boardroom is a collection of individuals, and individuals have varying motives, egos, agendas and qualifications. Sometimes the dynamics can go off track.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

The only thing we don't do together is get in front of an actor and show any indecision at all about what we think. We don't always agree, so we meet privately, then one or the other will approach the actor.

It's not refreshing where there is confusion or any kind of discomfort in a group that has to work that closely together.

I think that a president needs to have a variety of views presented. But also, there has to be a team effort, because otherwise, I think it creates a dissonance and difficulty.

The environment in a writer's room, I've really come to feel, should be some form of democracy.

As far as I can see there are no problems with people in our band as far as the relationships go anyway.

I can do whatever I want. They will tell me if what I am doing is stupid or a total waste of time. I may tell them that they are wrong, and we will come to an agreement.

But Eddie does not make all the decisions. Eddie can listen to reason; Eddie can be swayed or talked in or out of certain things. Eddie allows other people to lead in this band and to have certain roles that are very fundamental to the decision-making process.

The way you build trust with your team is around super-clear communication in that instant when they say, 'I will be sad if you don't do X.' You have to say, 'We're not going to do X, and here's why, and believe me, you'll be much sadder later if I let you go do it and you spend a bunch of time on it and nothing ever happens.'

We encounter very healthy boardroom debates and pretty diverse views, so we have always had the benefit of diversity of opinion and expression before we take some important calls.