L E A D E R SHI P
WHAT’S YOUR MOTIVE?
44 / CHIEFEXECUTIVE.NET / MARCH/APRIL 2020
INTERVIEW BY DAN BIGMAN
THE IDEA CAME TO HIM IN A ROOM FULL OF CEOS. Patrick Lencioni, the bestselling author known for business classics like The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Advantage and The Ideal Team Player, was sitting in on a roundtable conversation with a dozen or so chief executives from a variety of businesses—small, medium, large. He was talking about improving teamwork and organizational health by first creating a culture of trust among the CEO and their senior reports when he noticed something odd. At least to him. “I was giving them advice, pretty standard, and many of them were writing it down,” he says. “But there were a number of them that were rejecting it out of hand. I asked myself, Why would these people reject it? Suddenly, it occurred to me: If they’re doing this job for their own entertainment or pleasure, they wouldn’t want to do any of the things I’m saying. Building a healthy organization is simple but difficult, and leaders who have the wrong motive are just not that interested.” The result of that unsettling moment is The Motive (Wiley, 2020), Lencioni’s 12th—and perhaps his most incisive—book. At a pivotal time for leadership in America, with critics across the political spectrum targeting CEOs as prime suspects for society’s ills, Lencioni enters the fray with a more elemental, more uncomfortable question: Why do you want to be a leader in the first
PHOTOS BY JAMIE RAIN, LUNCH BREAK HEADSHOTS
At a pivotal time for leadership in America, bestselling author Patrick Lencioni digs into the most existential, uncomfortable question of all: Why do you want to be a CEO in the first place?
