I had a recent speaking engagement for Executive Renaissance Forums, a peer-to-peer group of lively business owners, facilitated and coached by Mike Kleis, founder of Kleis Consulting.

I loved this group! They meet monthly for a half-day session packed with breakfast and great coffee, professional development, and group brainstorming to solve their burning business challenges or develop new ideas. But what I loved most was the tribal culture like the one I mentioned in a previous post. Although they each operate a separate business, they have become a cohesive leadership team for one another.

The group was in the process of reading the book, The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive by Patrick Lencioni. I read it too, and in it the author outlines four disciplines for organizational health:

1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Create organizational clarity
3. Over-communicate organizational clarity
4. Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems

As their speaker/educator, I briefly reviewed these four and I showed this visual, similar to the one displayed in the book:

Let me just say, I love the book, but about your visuals Mr. Lencioni, we need to talk!

My focus that day was #3: Over-communicate organizational clarity. So to demonstrate a concept I teach about the power of visual communication, I started with Lencioni’s model.

Then I applied his model to a visual metaphor that I knew would be very familiar to many in the room.

I illustrated the process of pouring concrete.

I know you are doing a double-take, but stay with me. What could pouring concrete have to do with the organizational health of a business?

Let me show you.

The Cohesive Leadership Team is the T-footing of the foundation. It needs to be set below the freezing line to help keep the rest of the structure solid even when tough times strike.

Organizational Clarity, or the foundation of the organization, is held up by that Cohesive Leadership Team, and its job is to be solid, or in our case, clear.

I chose the anchor bolt as representative of Over-communicating Organizational Clarity. It is what holds the unit together. Without it, the pieces will separate over time.

And finally, the wire mesh within the poured concrete is a nice reflection of Reinforcing Organizational Clarity Through Human Systems. It provides a framework that instills the overall purpose of the structure as a whole.

So there you have it. A key lesson in communicating successfully is to “anchor bolt” your message to something already known and familiar. Get creative and take some risks. I’m no concrete-pouring ninja, but most of my executive students in the room were.

And before our session was over, they not only remembered Lencioni’s model and its purpose — they left with some tools to communicate with more impact for their organizations. The next time you need to spread a message, what will you do differently?