Patrick Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

A Leadership Fable
IN A NUTSHELL
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THE 5 DYSFUNCTIONS
TOOLS FOR LEADERS
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BOOKS
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IN A NUTSHELL

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  • “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”
  • “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
  • “Teamwork ultimately comes down to practicing a small set of principles over a long period of time. Success is not a matter of mastering subtle, sophisticated theory, but rather of embracing common sense with uncommon levels of discipline and persistence.”
  • “A fractured team is just like a broken arm or leg; fixing it is always painful, and sometimes you have to rebreak it to make it heal correctly. And the rebreak hurts a lot more than the initial break, because you have to do it on purpose.”

THE 5 DYSFUNCTIONS

These dysfunctions are links of an interconnected chain. One dysfunction leads to another. Even if just one is allowed to happen the teamwork is broken.
1. ABSENCE OF TRUST
  • Trust lies at the heart of a functioning, cohesive team. Without it, teamwork is all but impossible.
  • When team members trust one another they can pay much less attention to managing their status, hiding their mistakes and shortcomings. They can focus all their attention to the task and work much more efficiently.
  • “Trust is the foundation of real teamwork. (…)a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another.”
  • “Trust is an absolutely critical part of building teamwork.”
  • “Great teams do not hold back with one another,” she said. “They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”
  • “Team members who are not genuinely open with one another about their mistakes and weaknesses make it impossible to build a foundation for trust.”
  • “In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates must get comfortable being vulnerable with one another.”
  • “It requires team members to make themselves vulnerable to one another, and be confident that their respective vulnerabilities will not be used against them. The vulnerabilities I’m referring to include weaknesses, skill deficiencies, interpersonal shortcomings, mistakes, and requests for help.”
  • “Teams that lack trust waste inordinate amounts of time and energy managing their behaviors and interactions within the group.”
5. INATTENTION TO RESULTS
  • Occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.
  • “The ultimate dysfunction of a team is the tendency of members to care about something other than the collective goals of the group.”
TEAM STATUS
  • “For members of some teams, merely being part of the group is enough to keep them satisfied. For them, the achievement of specific results might be desirable, but not necessarily worthy of great sacrifice or inconvenience.”
  • Members often see success in merely being associated with their special organizations.
  • Examples: political groups, elite academic departments, and prestigious companies, altruistic nonprofit organizations.
INDIVIDUAL STATUS
  • The tendency of people to focus on enhancing their own positions or career prospects at the expense of their team.
2. FEAR OF CONFLICT
  • The absence of trust directly results fear of conflict.
  • “If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.”
  • “Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.”
  • “A lack of healthy conflict is a problem because it ensures the third dysfunction of a team: lack of commitment.”
3. LACK OF COMMITMENT
  • It is the most common dysfunction of teams in general.
  • Lack of commitment leads to failure to buy in to decisions.
  • Without having aired their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy-in and commit to decisions, though they may feign agreement during meetings.
  • “Because of this lack of real commitment and buy-in, team members develop an avoidance of accountability.”
4. AVOIDANCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY
  • Without committing to a clear plan of action, even the most focused and driven people often hesitate to call their peers on actions and behaviors that seem counterproductive to the good of the team.
  • Failure to hold one another accountable creates an environment where the fifth dysfunction can thrive. Inattention to results.
  • “The essence of this dysfunction is the unwillingness of team members to tolerate the interpersonal discomfort that accompanies calling a peer on his or her behavior and the more general tendency to avoid difficult conversations.”
  • “The most effective and efficient means of maintaining high standards of performance on a team is peer pressure.”
  • “More than any policy or system, there is nothing like the fear of letting down respected teammates that motivates people to improve their performance.”
5. INATTENTION TO RESULTS
  • Occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.
  • “The ultimate dysfunction of a team is the tendency of members to care about something other than the collective goals of the group.”
TEAM STATUS
  • “For members of some teams, merely being part of the group is enough to keep them satisfied. For them, the achievement of specific results might be desirable, but not necessarily worthy of great sacrifice or inconvenience.”
  • Members often see success in merely being associated with their special organizations.
  • Examples: political groups, elite academic departments, and prestigious companies, altruistic nonprofit organizations.
INDIVIDUAL STATUS
  • The tendency of people to focus on enhancing their own positions or career prospects at the expense of their team.
OPPOSITE MODEL
How members of truly cohesive teams behave
  1. They trust one another.
  2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
  3. They commit to decisions and plans of action.
  4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
  5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.

TOOLS FOR LEADERS

Suggestions for overcoming the 5 dysfunctions
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DYSFUNCTION 1.

BUILDING TRUST
  • Building trust is never easy. It takes time and continuous effort. However, with the following tools, you can speed up the process.
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Personal Histories Exercise
  • Team members are sitting around a table and answering a few questions about themselves.
A few suggestions:
  • Hometown? Number of kids in the family? Interesting childhood hobbies? Biggest challenge growing up? First job? Worst job?
  • Team members start to relate with one another and see each other as a human being with life stories.
  • Encourages empathy and understanding.
  • Minimum time required: 30 minutes
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Personality and Behavioral Preference Profiles
  • Allowing members to better understand and empathise with one another.
  • There are different profiling tools out there. One of the best personality assessment tool is the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator).
  • “The purpose of most of these tools is to provide practical and scientifically valid behavioral descriptions of various team members according to the diverse ways that they think, speak, and act.”
  • Benefits of psychological profiling tools: non-judgemental, research based, involves team members to participate actively in the process.
  • Minimum time required: 4 hours.
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Experiential Team Exercises
  • “Many teams do them with the hope of building trust. And while there are certainly some benefits derived from rigorous and creative outdoor activities involving collective support and cooperation, those benefits do not always translate directly to the working world.”
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Team Effectiveness Exercise
  • It requires team members to identify the single most important contribution that each of their peers makes to the team.
  • As well as the one area that they must either improve upon or eliminate for the good of the team.
  • Focusing on just one team member as a time, beginning with the team leader.
  • This exercise some degree of trust in order to be useful.
  • Minimum time required: 60 minutes
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360 degree feedback
  • A powerful tool to provide constructive criticism to each team member.
  • However, use it carefully and wisely because if there is not enough trust it can damage the team.
  • To key to making it work: divorcing it entirely from compensation and formal performance evaluation.
  • It is a developmental tool, that allows teams to identify strengths and weaknesses.
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The Role of the Leader
  • “The most important action that a leader must take to encourage the building of trust on a team is to demonstrate vulnerability first. This requires that a leader risk losing face in front of the team, so that subordinates will take the same risk themselves.”
  • Create an environment that does not punish vulnerability —> admissions of weakness or failure should be safe
  • “Finally, displays of vulnerability on the part of a team leader must be genuine; they cannot be staged. One of the best ways to lose the trust of a team is to feign vulnerability in order to manipulate the emotions of others.”

DYSFUNCTION 2.

ENCOURAGE PRODUCTIVE IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT
  • There is a huge difference between productive ideological conflict from destructive fighting and interpersonal politics. The role of the productive conflict is to produce the best possible solution in the shortest period of time.
  • When team members avoid productive ideological conflict (to avoid hurting team members’ feelings) often creates dangerous tension from the many-many small unresolved debates between team members.
  • “All great relationships, the ones that last over time, require productive conflict in order to grow. This is true in marriage, parenthood, friendship, and certainly business.”
  • Healthy conflict is actually a time saver. “Contrary to the notion that teams waste time and energy arguing, those that avoid conflict actually doom themselves to revisiting issues again and again without resolution.”
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MINING of conflict
  • Members of teams that tend to avoid conflict must occasionally assume the role of a “miner of conflict”
  • someone who extracts buried disagreements within the team and sheds the light of day on them.
  • Call out sensitive issues that are under the surface.
  • Important to encourage team members to stay with the conflict until it’s resolved.
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Real-Time Permission
  • When team members become uncomfortable with the conflict it’s important to remind them that the conflict what they are doing is healthy, necessary, and good for the team.
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The Role of the Leader
  • It is necessary not to overprotect people from conflict.
  • Premature interruption of disagreements prevents team members from developing conflict management skills.
  • “This can be a challenge because many leaders feel that they are somehow failing in their jobs by losing control of their teams during conflict.”
  • People learn best from imitation. “A leader’s ability to personally model appropriate conflict behavior is essential.”

DYSFUNCTION 3.

ENCOURAGE COMMITMENT AND BUY-IN
What is commitment?
  • “In the context of a team, commitment is a function of two things: clarity and buy-in. Great teams make clear and timely decisions and move forward with complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who voted against the decision.”
  • The two greatest causes of the lack of commitment are the desire for consensus and the need for certainty:
CONSENSUS
  • “Reasonable human beings do not need to get their way in order to support a decision, but only need to know that their opinions have been heard and considered.”
  • Great teams consider everyone’s ideas.
CONSENSUS
  • In most cases total and complete agreement between team members is impossible. Great teams find a way to achieve buy-in even when there is no complete concensus.
  • Military axiom that a decision is better than no decision.
  • “It is better to make a decision boldly and be wrong—and then change direction with equal boldness—than it is to waffle.”
  • DO NOT delay important decisions until the team can make sure they have enough data to make the right decision.
  • Willingness to commit and act without perfect information.
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Cascading Messaging
  • Takes just a few minutes and it is absolutely free.
  • At the end of every staff meeting the team should review the key decisions and agreed what needs to be communicated to employees and other members of the organization.
  • With this practice the team can make sure they are all on the same page and every detail of the communicated message is the same.
  • Agree which messages are confidential.
  • The team can avoid contradictory messages from different managers who attended the same meeting.
  • Minimum time required: 10 minutes
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Cascading Messaging
  • A useful tool for teams who are struggling with reaching consensus
  • The team must demonstrate decisiveness in relatively low-risk situations.
  • Teams eventually realize that the quality of their decisions is better than they expected.
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Deadline
  • One of the simplest and most effective tools to achieve commitment.
  • “The worst enemy of a team that is susceptible to this dysfunction is ambiguity, and timing is one of the most critical factors that must be made clear.”
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Contingency and Worst-Case Scenario Analysis
  • Most useful for teams who are struggling with commitment.
  • Clarifying the worst-case scenario for a decision they are struggling to make.
  • Teams can assess and estimate the cost of an incorrect decision and plan a course correction if it is necessary.
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The Role of the Leader
  • Must be comfortable with ambiguity: making decisions and committing to action when there is no complete information.
  • Pushing every decision to closure and encouraging team members to commit.

DYSFUNCTION 4.

ESTABLISH A CULTURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY
  • The basis of accountability is commitment. It is very hard to hold someone accountable who didn’t commit him or herself to any action.
  • The essence of the dysfunction 4. is the unwillingness of team members to tolerate the interpersonal discomfort that accompanies calling a peer on his or her behavior and the
  • “It refers specifically to the willingness of team members to call their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the team.”
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Publication of Goals and Standards
  • The enemy of accountability is ambiguity.
  • Clarify publicly exactly what the team needs to achieve, who needs to deliver what, and how everyone must behave in order to succeed.
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Team rewards
  • Shifting rewards away from individual performance to team achievement.
  • This helps teams to become more coherent and act together to achieve results.
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The Role of the Leader
  • Must be comfortable with ambiguity: making decisions and committing to action when there is no complete information.
  • Pushing every decision to closure and encouraging team members to commit.
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Simple and Regular Progress Reviews
  • A good way to ensure accountability is to encourage team members to regularly communicate with one another.
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The Role of the Leader
  • Leaders of dysfunctional teams often create an accountability vacuum within the team, leaving themselves as the only source of discipline. “Team members assume that the leader is holding others accountable, and so they hold back even when they see something that isn’t right.”
  • Create a culture of accountability and encourage team members to hold each other accountable.

DYSFUNCTION 5.

PRODUCE RESULTS
  • Mutual accountability is the basis of producing actual results.
  • Teams that are not committing to results focus primarily on managing team status and individual status.
  • “If teammates are not being held accountable for their contributions, they will be more likely to turn their attention to their own needs, and to the advancement of themselves or their departments.”
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Public Declaration of Results
  • For most teams (except sports teams) it can be helpful to make public proclamations about intended success.
  • “Teams that are willing to commit publicly to specific results are more likely to work with a passionate, even desperate desire to achieve those results.”
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The Role of the Leader
  • “Team leaders must be selfless and objective, and reserve rewards and recognition for those who make real contributions to the achievement of group goals.”
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The Role of the Leader
  • Must be comfortable with ambiguity: making decisions and committing to action when there is no complete information.
  • Pushing every decision to closure and encouraging team members to commit.
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Results-Based Rewards
  • Tie their rewards and compensation, to the achievement of specific outcomes.
  • However, do not rely only on financial incentives, it can easily backfire.
  • “Letting someone take home a bonus merely for “trying hard,” even in the absence of results, sends a message that achieving the outcome may not be terribly important after all.”
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The Role of the Leader
  • Leaders of dysfunctional teams often create an accountability vacuum within the team, leaving themselves as the only source of discipline. “Team members assume that the leader is holding others accountable, and so they hold back even when they see something that isn’t right.”
  • Create a culture of accountability and encourage team members to hold each other accountable.

FURTHER READING

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The end!