Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team

"Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare."

— Patrick Lencioni

Lencioni worked at Bain, Oracle and Sybase before founding The Table Group in 1997, his consulting firm in leadership and organizational health. In 2002 he published The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a fable that became a reference for leadership teams around the world. Three years later he wrote this field guide for whoever has to put the model into practice: with tools, exercises and answers to the objections that come up in the room.

Almost every leadership team believes it works as a team, and many are really a group of people who report to the same boss and defend their area. Lencioni poses two questions before starting: are we really a team, with common goals that can only be achieved together?, and are we willing to invest the time and the discomfort this demands? If either answer is no, it's better to resolve that before applying the model.

The model is a pyramid of five dysfunctions, each with the work that overcomes it:

• Build trust. Not the trust of knowing the other person delivers, but the trust of being able to be vulnerable: admit a mistake, ask for help, acknowledge that someone knows more. Tools: the personal histories exercise (where you grew up, how many siblings you have, what was the hardest challenge of your childhood) and a personality profile shared with the team.
• Master conflict. Without trust, the team avoids debate and lives in artificial harmony. With it, ideas can be argued with passion. Tools: have each member identify their style in the face of conflict and have the team explicitly agree on how it wants to debate.
• Achieve commitment. If there was no debate, people don't commit, even if they nod in the meeting. The goal isn't consensus, but for each person to feel heard and to back the decision. Tool: at the close of every meeting, ask what exactly we decided today and what we're going to communicate to our teams.
• Embrace accountability. Without clear commitment, nobody calls out a peer. Tool: the team effectiveness exercise, where each person says of each colleague their greatest contribution and the behavior that most gets in the team's way.
• Focus on results. When nobody is held accountable, each person protects their status, their ego or their area. Tool: a dashboard with a few critical indicators and a thematic goal shared by the whole team for a few months.

The effectiveness exercise is the one that best shows the book's logic. Lencioni places it in the fourth stage, once the team has worked on trust, because telling a colleague in front of everyone which of their behaviors gets in the way is uncomfortable. When it works, the team hears out loud what used to be said in the hallways, each person leaves with a concrete point to work on and hard conversations stop being exceptional.

The guide warns that the common mistake is treating this as an event. An offsite session works to get started, but the model works only if the leader practices it every week: if they're the first to show vulnerability, if they provoke debate when the meeting is too calm and if they hold a peer accountable instead of waiting for the boss to do it.

A simple place to begin: in your next leadership team meeting, reserve the last ten minutes to ask what exactly we decided today, who is responsible for each thing and what we're going to tell our teams. Write it in front of everyone. The first time, you'll discover there was less agreement than it seemed.

As a founder it will help you turn your leadership team into a real team as the company grows, and to diagnose precisely why a meeting feels unproductive. And it's a useful guide for teams outside work too, from a family business to a sports team.