The Motive

The Question Nobody Asks

There is a question Patrick Lencioni thinks every leader should answer before they answer anything else, and almost nobody does. It is not what your strategy is. It is not what your numbers say. It is not whether you have the right people on the bus. The question is much smaller and much more dangerous than that. Why do you actually want this job?

Most leaders, when pressed, will give you a tidy answer about impact or growth or building something that matters. Lencioni, who has spent more than two decades watching executives up close, says the tidy answer is usually a cover for a different one. The honest answer, the one most people will not say out loud and many will not even say to themselves, is that they wanted the title, the corner office, the autonomy, the money, the chance to finally do what they want to do after years of doing what other people told them to do. That answer, Lencioni argues, is the silent reason so many capable, intelligent, well-meaning leaders quietly fail.

The Motive is his attempt to name this and to do something about it. It is also, by his own description, the shortest and simplest book he has written, and the one he thinks matters most. He recommends starting with this book before any of his others. If your motive for leading is wrong, he says, none of the practical advice in his earlier books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage, will stick. You will read it, nod, and then quietly avoid doing the things those books told you to do, because doing those things is not what you actually came for.

The book opens with a story about Alan Mulally, the executive who ran Boeing's commercial division during the launch of the 777 and then went back to Ford and saved the company. Mulally once told Lencioni that there was a single line in The Advantage he disagreed with, the part where Lencioni wrote that leadership requires suffering. Mulally pushed back. Leadership, he said, is a privilege. It is a joy. It should not be framed as something sacrificial. Lencioni, who had spent years watching executives recoil from the suffering parts of the job, looked at Mulally and thought, "Alan, you're not in Kansas anymore." Mulally, who actually grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, was the exception. He really did feel that way. The vast majority of leaders do not, and the book is for them.