Named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the most in-demand business speakers, leadership guru Patrick Lencioni spoke today to an assembly of business executives in the Curb Event Center. Belmont’s Scarlett Leadership Institute brought Lencioni to campus for this special event.
The founder and president of The Table Group, Inc., a specialized management-consulting firm focused on organizational health, Lencioni has been described by The One-Minute Manager’s Ken Blanchard as “fast defining the next generation of leadership thinkers.” He is the author of eight best-selling books with over 2.5 million copies sold. His talk Wednesday focused primarily on thoughts from his best-selling work, The Five Temptations of a CEO.
Lencioni outlined the five temptations as the desire to protect a career, the desire to be popular, the need to make right decisions, the avoidance of conflict and the desire for invulnerability. In commenting on CEOs desire to appear invincible, Lencioni said, “To be a great leader, you have to build trust with your team… We have to demonstrate that we are in touch with our humanity. People already see us for what we are. We need to come clean about it.”
In concluding his session at Belmont, Lencioni also touched on the topic from another book, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. He pointed out that the significant factors that determine employees’ work satisfaction are rarely tied to job duties or pay. Rather, feelings of anonymity or being ignored by management, a sense of irrelevance and an inability to assess personal contribution to the greater good contribute most often to creating a miserable job atmosphere.
Patrick Lencioni’s work has been featured in numerous publications such as Fast Company, INC Magazine, USA Today, Fortune and Harvard Business Review. As a consultant and speaker, he has worked with thousands of senior executives in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 corporations and professional sports teams to universities and nonprofits, including Southwest Airlines, Barnes & Noble, General Mills, Newell Rubbermaid, SAP, Washington Mutual and the US Military Academy at West Point.
