The Advantage

And today's conversation is about something every organization has, whether we intentionally create it or not, and that's culture.

My guest is Adrian Nakashima, CEO of South Coast Botanic Garden and Foundation, and Adrian and her team have been taking a deep dive into Patrick Lencioni's work on organizational health, particularly the framework he lays out in his book, The Advantage.

Um, his basic premise is provocative but remarkably simple.

Organizational health may ultimately be more important to an organization's success than almost anything else.

But thanks again for doing this.

Welcome to the show.

And, you know, before we kind of get into The Advantage and the work happening at the garden, I'd love for our listeners to know a little bit more about you.

Um, can you give us a brief kind of version of your leadership journey? What ultimately brought you to South Coast Botanic Garden, and how has your role as a leader evolved during your time there?

And [chuckles] there's another author I'll throw in here, uh, Patrick, uh, Lencioni, and it's, um...

Patrick talks extensively in his book called The Advantage about organizational health and clarity, and here's where I want to push that idea a little further.

Clarity at the executive table isn't enough.

I want to know whether the clarity survives the trip down through the organization.

They're seeing you.

So you run the same stinking playbook.

You just run it with your team, okay? Start with the one-on-ones, and I mean this week.

Now, you don't need answers for these because, of course, you don't have any answers, but nobody's giving you any.

And I vividly remember eventually just kind of calling the fundraise and getting worried that maybe I wasn't going to be able to get back to New York.

It was when there was talk about states shutting down travel, booked a red eye and just like got on a red eye to get home because I didn't want to be away from my husband and in an unfamiliar city on top of everything else.

But then, of course, had to confront, OK, clearly this is not the optimal time to be raising funds.

And of course, Athena had planned on a fundraise.

So we have values that we get measured on, and if you're not living up to your value measurement, boom, you're getting a conversation.

We are a team, and n- under, under we are a team, we really like, um, Pat Lencioni's The Advantage process, is never leave your teammate hanging.

So if you leave me hanging, that's the first, you left me hanging.

I got to the meeting and you weren't there.

Very instrumental.

And I r- Pat Lencioni's work, really enjoy his work.

And The Advantage I think has been super helpful in terms of his thought on and his process on values, 'cause it makes it really simple to reinforce them.

Yeah.

Lencioni.

We read the book, The Advantage, which I love.

Highly recommend that for anyone who is in the stage of forming of your team.

And we did Working Genius, and we're now rolling it out to our whole organization.

very cool to be on cnbc because they typically call you with you know no notice and they're like hey there's a car waiting outside to take you to new jersey and then you get swept off to new jersey and the car waits outside while you go in you're ushered through conveyor belt of hair and makeup and then next thing you know you're sitting next to the anchors and they a lot of times don't tell you what you're there to talk about because they want it off the cuff So you just kind of have to be prepared.

And, you know, you see the big book image behind me.

I go through some lessons in there about how to prepare for those situations.

And then the next thing you know, you're back home and you were just on CNBC and your phone starts going off and they've got all this media, you know, coverage and clips that you can post to the internet and things like that.

I think we're, this is kind of a side note, but we're so wired to be a part of that herd I mentioned earlier, to go out, work your nine to five, don't do things that are uncomfortable.

but then you actually feel uncomfortable because you're not doing the thing that you like to do and it's very freeing when you have call it a mini i don't like using the term mental break but there is a crossroads that i think some people come to i got there where i was like you know what I'm going to see if this can run by itself.

I'm just going to go do this thing over here, which was right in the book.

It was very therapeutic.